Commodity Desk Academies
Coffee Desk Academy
Twenty courses. Beginner to advanced. No course assumes what it has not taught.
The learner must be able to reconcile origin purchases, customer fixations, futures positions, foreign exchange and margin cash flows into one consistent position and profit statement.
20 courses · 100 to 130 chapters each · every chapter one 8 to 10 minute explainer · self-paced
The pathway
Twenty courses in dependency order
A course may only assume capability taught by a lower-numbered course, and the level column never falls as you move down the table.
| # | Course | Level | Builds on | What this course owns |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Coffee market foundations | |||
| 01 | Fundamentals of Coffee Trading & Price Risk | 1/10 | none | A plain-language orientation to how coffee moves from farm to roaster, who the counterparties are, and why the price changes. |
| 02 | Origins, Quality & Commercial Grading | 2/10 | 01 | Cup scoring and defect grading of arabica and robusta lots, and how origin and preparation become a commercial quality description. |
| 03 | Units, Benchmarks & Differential Quotations | 2/10 | 01, 02 | Reading and converting coffee price quotations across bags, pounds, cents, exchange benchmarks and the differential convention. |
| 04 | Supply, Demand, Crop Cycles & Weather | 3/10 | 01, 02, 03 | Building a crop and consumption balance from flowering, harvest, carryover and weather information. |
| 05 | Purchase & Sale Contracts | 3/10 | 02, 03, 04 | Drafting and reading fixed-price physical contracts under trade association rules, covering quality, shipment, tolerance and default clauses, and stopping short of fixation mechanics, which belong to course 14. |
| B | Physical execution and the cash cycle | |||
| 06 | Origin Procurement & Cooperatives | 4/10 | 02, 04, 05 | Buying at origin through cooperatives, exporters and farmer groups, including local currency pricing, pre-finance and advance structures. |
| 07 | Export Logistics & Documents | 4/10 | 05, 06 | Moving coffee from origin warehouse to destination with the shipping, customs and document set that controls title and payment. |
| 08 | Inventory, Carry & Working Capital | 5/10 | 05, 06, 07 | Funding and measuring the physical position: carry cost, financing lines, stock valuation, and the cash timeline from origin payment to customer receipt. |
| 09 | Quality Claims, Weights & Settlement | 5/10 | 02, 05, 07 | Resolving outturn weight loss, quality claims and arbitration into a final invoice and settlement amount. |
| C | Basis, futures and currency | |||
| 10 | Differential Trading & Basis | 6/10 | 03, 04, 05 | Trading the differential itself: how physical basis is quoted, how it moves, and how it is risk managed separately from the exchange price. |
| 11 | Arabica Futures & Physical Hedging | 6/10 | 03, 08, 10 | Hedging washed and natural arabica positions on the arabica contract, including contract specification, lot sizing, roll and hedge ratio. |
| 12 | Robusta Futures & Physical Hedging | 6/10 | 02, 10, 11 | Hedging robusta positions on the robusta contract, including the cross-contract hedge choice and the relationship between the two exchanges. |
| 13 | FX & Combined Exposure | 7/10 | 06, 08, 11, 12 | Measuring and hedging the currency exposure created by local currency origin purchases, dollar denominated futures and non-dollar sales, and combining currency and price exposure into one position view. |
| D | Fixation and structured price protection | |||
| 14 | Price-to-Be-Fixed Contracts & Fixations | 7/10 | 05, 10, 11, 12 | Operating price-to-be-fixed business end to end: fixation orders and deadlines, partial fixings, unfixed balances, and the transfer of futures positions between buyer and seller. |
| 15 | Options, Floors & Collars | 8/10 | 11, 12, 14 | Using exchange and over-the-counter options on coffee to build floors, caps and collars around a physical or fixation exposure. |
| 16 | Roaster Procurement & Margin Protection | 8/10 | 05, 14, 15 | Running the buy side of the trade: roaster blend cover, forward purchase programmes, and the protection of a roasting margin. |
| 17 | Specialty Coffee, Traceability & Premiums | 8/10 | 02, 10, 16 | Pricing and administering specialty, certified and traceable lots where the premium is detached from the exchange price. |
| E | Resilience and integrated desk practice | |||
| 18 | Origin Diversification & Supply Resilience | 9/10 | 04, 06, 07, 17 | Designing an origin portfolio that survives a crop failure, export restriction or logistics breakdown in any single country. |
| 19 | Default & Margin-Liquidity Stress | 9/10 | 08, 13, 14, 18 | Stress testing counterparty default, washout and margin call liquidity across the financed physical and futures book. |
| 20 | Merchant & Roaster Simulation | 10/10 | 14, 16, 18, 19 | Running a full desk under time pressure and reconciling origin purchases, customer fixations, futures positions, currency hedges and margin cash into one defensible position and profit statement. |
Every course states the capability it owns. The brochure carries the same table plus the chapter list behind each course, which is the quickest way to find the course that teaches the thing you cannot currently do.
Take one course, or the whole pathway
Each course stands alone. Taken in order, the twenty build one desk capability from no prior knowledge.