Thanks for your insight and continued patient responses.

>"Armajaro trading arm bought something like 240,100 tonnes of cocoa for around £650 million, or ~£2,700 per tonne, in July 2010." (Lazare) //

>"Then the answer is no, of course not." (ibid) //

The ICCO [1] has an interesting section at paragraph 31 on page 10 where it discusses this tonnage [at arms length] and says a group of interested parties made appeals that unfair trading was attempting to manipulate the futures market. This suggests that those companies were thinking something along the lines of what I was suggesting: that this purchase was trying to manipulate prices, so the money made would not be from the trade directly.

>"[...] This price development on the London market led 16 cocoa companies and trade associations to send a letter to NYSE Liffe to complain that “a manipulation of the contract” was “bringing the London market into disrepute”. Many market commentators argued that this
backwardation was fuelled by a squeeze, which is a trader or a group of traders deliberately disrupting the supply of physical cocoa to artificially increase the price of cocoa futures contracts which are about to expire, and hence to profit from it while other traders find themselves struggling to fulfil their obligations. In response to this allegation, NYSE Liffe advised that it did not find any evidence of
abusive trading behaviour on the cocoa market." (ICCO report [1]) //

You said the price "tumbled off a cliff, dropping to a low of ~£1,8200 in November 2010". According to the chart you linked a tonne of cocoa averaged [?] £2.11k [in London?] in July 2010 when Amajaro made the trade. So why would companies be complaining about backwardation then? [2] Says the price was pushed up and rose by 0.7% after the purchase.

Presumably then those with warehoused stock that's accessible can undercut Amajaro in order to bring down the price? But if there are sufficient goods for this then the "other traders find themselves struggling to fulfil their obligations" from [1] makes no sense.

Also seemingly there was a major issue with Ivory Coast [aka Cote d'Ivoire] being under a flood warning, that previous years had returned deficits in terms of the global demand vs. the global harvest. Was this the issue that broke Ward: There were various embargoes and shenanigans around the Ivory Coast's presidential elections and when they eventually shipped the harvest proved excellent and there were massive excesses [1].

>So yeah, obviously Armajaro lost a bunch of money on that trade, precisely because of the volume they were working with. //

Looks like a top estimate for that is -£72M based on the July to November price change for 240k tonnes.

>* Nor would this trade have made sense if Armajaro had known that prices were going to spike due to an external shock; then they should have bought options, not actual physical cocoa.* //

Correct me if I'm wrong but you can't corner the market that way because the seller can default; moreover a future glut can come in and wipe out your position and/or movement of goods can alleviate the local shortfall [it's something like 3-4 weeks to ship cocoa from US warehouses to European buyers]. Thus it wouldn't create a clamour in the market to ensure that delivery of the commodity can continue, as was apparently the case here?

- - -

Couple of figures that are pertinent:

* Re your edit [3] puts a figure of £40M on the 2002 trade, Wikipedia reports a £58M gain.

* Ward's CC+ fund made 15% in 2010, not exactly sure how much that is but it seems to have been £25M based on some other figures (all Amajaro funds passing £1B, CC+ being 20%, working backwards from [4]).

[1] http://www.icco.org/about-us/international-cocoa-agreements/...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/7895242/Mystery-t...

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/789...

[4] http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/06/anthony-ward-letters/