Trading pits descended into pandemonium Friday when rumors hit that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (“CME”) would be launching Beskar futures in the second quarter of 2021. Initial 3-month delivery prices were pegged at $200/lb. but quickly broke the $1,000/lb. mark in afternoon trading hours. Afterhours trading on CME GlobeX continued the sprint and at time of writing 3-month futures sit at $1,440/lb.
“We haven’t seen this kind of market boom in a fictitious metal since the Adamantium run of 2010,” said CME Vice President Robert Schultz-Goodman, “and even then, we didn’t see the same velocity of orders.”
Beskar, an exceptionally durable ore mined exclusively from the planet Mandalore, is primarily used as a shielding material against blasters and lightsabers – neither of which are yet widely used in the U.S. market. However, industry insiders have suggested for years that the country is only a few parsecs away from widescale adoption.
“It’s undeniable that pretend commodities with no underlying value will be the story of the next several years at least,” senior analyst for Cargill James Waters explained. “One need only look at the cryptocurrency market to see that investors want exposure to fake or made-up products now more than any other sector.”
Another complexity surrounding the material is that smelting it into usable goods requires proprietary methods known only to skilled Mandalorian craftsmen, who are in increasingly short supply. Rumors spread last year that two firms in Shenzhen had effectively copied the methods and were producing Mandalorian armor replicas, but these reports were never confirmed.
The mineral is hardly the first fictitious commodity to hit the CME, first with Mithril run of 2001 and later with the Adamantium boom that bookended the past decade.
