Odd Lots · Monday, August 3, 2026
Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling explains that the tungsten market historically acts as a 'prediction market for war,' with investments increasing as conflict becomes more likely. He notes that mines have historically opened before major wars like WWI and WWII and closed afterward, demonstrating this cyclical relationship.
“You can look at it as a bit like a sort of century old missing prediction market for war basically, and I didn't realize this until I started looking at tungsten, but actually, if you go back right to the turn of the twentieth century, it has operated like a prediction market in the sense that people making real investments, once they get a sense that war is a real possibility, they put real money behind tungsten.”
“And this mine I visited has this extraordinary history where it first opened in nineteen seventeen during World War One. It closed at the end of the war because then the war ended, no one needed the tungsten anymore, and the European government sold it for all their tungsten stockpiles. Opens up again nineteen thirty eight before World War II starts.”