Large liquid markets are currently our best method of predicting what the price of something will be in the future. If you disagree, you're welcome to try your hand at making better predictions, and will make a lot more on that than this project could ever bring in, or more likely, lose money.
But that expected future price information is almost never converted into useful insights for policymakers. Neither is it packaged in a way that the public can understand. It's kept away in finance firms in Chicago and New York and London and Hong Kong.
What kind of information do people want?
- Combine bond prices with inflation expectations to tell me about the likelihood of repayment of government bonds. That lets me track the status of the war in Ukraine at a high level very easily, understand how well Milei is doing, or track the misadventures of Liz Truss.
- I heard something about a famine: another user made a bundle of staple foodstuffs and shared it to me as a list of items to track that I can past in, so I use that and see what the expected prices are in six months.
- I need to get elected, and Americans are convinced that the president controls gas prices and vote downballot to punish or reward them. What are prices expected to be at election time?
- Did policy X have an impact on price Y? What about the overall trend during the X presidency?
How do you get it to them?
- Providers like Bloomberg and Barchart have raw commodities futures data: you'll need to spend a little time comparing options and picking the best API, and doing some testing to make sure that the data is sensible.
- Then you need to convert the raw data on futures and prices into meaningful information. There are plenty of textbooks and papers on options pricing at this point, and I'm happy to consult on what information is particularly policy-relevant: if you offer people data and say you want to shape it better to their wishes, many people are willing to spare an hour of advice.
- Then you need to present that information usefully: graphs, charts, Wolfram Alpha style queries (that last one is probably not worth the effort).
- General point: real % change relative to today is much more important than $/barrel or $/bushell
- Additional bonus features, perhaps offered to patrons / paying users: auto-alerts when some values exceed a set range, weekly/daily customized newsletter with their key charts, prioritization of new info sources requests.
What does an MVP look like?
- Oil prices / futures, displayed a few different ways and shown over various time horizons. Other commodities are also important, but oil is highly fungible and incredibly important.
How do they find out about it?
- Post this to Hacker News and the rest should take care of itself.
Why do this?
- Policymakers would make better decisions and be more informed if they had access to high-quality information about future prices in food, oil, and other goods. They don't: it's slow and filtered by people they don't trust.
- Doing this well shows that you can do an independent project, handle UI, handle web development, and deliver useful information to decisionmakers. After successfully completing such a project, you could easily end up with a role in data engineering, or an even higher-paying role in finance.