Peter Carlin

Peter Carlin is a veteran commodity broker and trader who has spent his career in wholesale energy and commodity markets. He is best known for explaining the physical logistics that drive oil prices and for making the case for gold as personal monetary insurance. Resource investors follow him because fuel shortages and monetary stress are two of the forces that move energy equities, mining stocks, and precious metals.

Carlin spent roughly 20 years as a commodity broker and trader with interdealer broking firms including ICAP, NatSource, Tullett and Eurobrokers, and has consulted for multinationals on energy risk management, the practice of measuring and hedging a company's exposure to fuel and power prices. As a journalist he has written for the Financial Times and Bloomberg, published in Jane's Defence and Money Week, and appears as a market commentator on BBC, CNN, and NBC. He is the co-author of A Pocketbook of Gold: A Survival Manual for Monetary Mayhem (first published in 2009, re-released as a PDF), a handbook on why, when, and in what form to own gold.

His market analysis starts with physical detail rather than price charts. On oil, he argues the real shortages are not barrels in general but specific grades and products: many Western refineries are built to run sour crude (high-sulfur oil), while much of the newer supply is light sweet crude, and inventories of diesel and jet fuel, the distillates that power transport, agriculture, and mining, have run thin. He tracks shipping chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, and the depletion of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR, the government's emergency oil stockpile). On the monetary side, he reads rising sovereign debt, currency intervention, and central bank gold buying as reasons for investors to hold gold, and to a lesser degree silver, as financial insurance outside the banking system.

Carlin discusses these themes as a recurring guest on gold-focused programs such as Palisades Gold Radio and the maneco64 channel. He does not manage a fund or publish a newsletter; his public record rests on brokerage, journalism, and broadcast commentary rather than stock picks. Investors get the most value from his work by reading it for market structure and monetary context, not as mining stock recommendations.