Does Glencore's float mark the top of the commodities boom?

Commodities giant Glencore is going public, aiming to raise $11bn on the stock market. That means there's one question that every contrarian investor will be asking themselves: is this the top of the commodities market? John Stepek investigates.

Giant commodities trader Glencore has confirmed that it's planning to list on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

The Swiss group hopes to sell up to $11bn of shares (most of it in London), with prices set to be announced in the middle of next month. It's set to be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in the world this year and the UK market's biggest ever.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.