A few weeks ago, Virginia-based Fintech firm Helios Artificial Intelligence launched a new AI platform dubbed CommodiTrack, which enables commodity buyers and traders to predict agricultural commodity prices based on the firm’s proprietary climate risk measure.
New Product Launch
CommodiTrack is an interactive AI-based platform that allows users to track, forecast and strategize to improve supply chain resiliency. The platform integrates a variety of key elements such as climate risk factors, price forecasting, demand and supply signals, and news all onto one easy to use platform.
CommodiTrack feautures Helios’ proprietary climate risk data set which includes over 500 billion unique risk signals generated by custom machine learning models specific to each of the 53 crops being tracked to generate unique trading signals for each commodity analyzed.
Francisco Martin-Rayo, co-founder and CEO of Helios explained the rationale for their latest product offering saying, “The launch of CommodiTrack is our response to the urgent needs of our customers in the face of increasing climate disruptions. Agrifood buyers and traders have never seen this level of climate and price volatility before, and the tools they’ve historically relied on are no longer working. With this new platform, we are democratizing access to the world’s best climate risk information so our customers can quickly identify and react to the climate risks impacting their supply chains.”
The CommodiTrack dashboard offers a range of features tailored to meet the needs of commodity traders, procurement leaders and market analysts, including:
- Climate Risk Analysis: One of the most powerful features of CommodiTrack, it offers an unprecedented deep dive into climate data, providing insights into the top 10 producing countries and the top six producing regions within those countries.
- Price Forecasting & Trading Signals: It offers a robust set of tools for tracking and forecasting commodity prices by integrating Helio’s proprietary climate risk data and algorithms with pricing information.
- Trade Insights: It provides historical data on the top 10 exporters and importers over the past decade, as well as updates on import and export tariffs, bans and other trade restrictions.
- Climate Change Trends: It offers a macro view of how climate risk is evolving over time, comparing current growing seasons with historical data.
- Supply Chain Visibility: This section provides detailed information on the top 10 producers of each commodity over the past 10 years and long-term projections for production, yield and demand.
- Expansive News Coverage: Sourcing from over 250,000 news outlets globally, this section provides real-time news on trade, supply and demand, pricing and climate events that could affect the commodities of interest.
One of the unique features of CommodiTrack is the provision of WA%RTM (Weighted Average Risk Ratio), a proprietary metric that quantifies climate risk by assessing the number of high-risk locations within the global market. The higher the WA%RTM, the greater the likelihood of a price shift for the commodity in question. For example, Helios’ climate risk platform saw a dramatic increase in the WA%R for Cocoa in December 2023, going from single digits to above 30%, which gave a strong “buy” signal weeks before a recent unprecedented price increase took place.
The initial release of CommodiTrack is focused on the top eight globally traded commodities including corn, wheat, cocoa, coffee, rice, sugarcane, soybeans and palm oil. In the coming weeks, the platform will expand to include similar insights into 50+ commodities, including all major fruits and vegetables.
Our Take
Historically, trading signals for agricultural commodities was based primarily on generic weather, supply, and historical yield data. In contrast, Helios AI’s recent launch of CommodiTrack greatly expands the accuracy of price forecasts for these commodities as it now includes commodity specific supply and demand metrics, granular climate risk data, news developments, and other relevant factors into one low cost and easy to use platform.
Over the past six months, Helios AI has conducted extensive backtesting of the signals generated by its platform for the various commodities it tracks and found them to be highly predictive of future price movements. In addition, Helios AI management explains that individual user access to CommodiTrack will cost just $399.00 / month – a price point that should allow most ag producers, buyers or traders to be able to afford the new platform.
We suspect that the uniqueness of the CommodiTrack platform, its extensive coverage, and its reasonable cost will attract many agricultural commodity users and traders to try the product in the coming months. It will be interesting to watch how Helios AI leverages its technology stack and enhances its product offerings in the future.