HardAssetsInvestor

Mike Norman, Hard Assets Investor (Norman): Hello everybody, and welcome to HardAssetsInvestor.com. I'm Mike Norman, your host. Today my guest is Anthony Grisanti, who is a CNBC contributor and one of the panelists on Futures Now. Anthony, welcome to the show; pleasure having you.

Anthony Grisanti, panelist, Futures Now (Grisanti): Thank you very much for having me.

Norman: Now, it’s also interesting to have you here, because you actually conduct your business on the NYMEX. You're coming from that old line …

Grisanti: … one of the dinosaurs …

Norman: … floor traders, the dinosaurs. I’d like to start off … if you could tell us a little bit about that. It’s now an anachronism with all the electronic trading. But you're literally still down there on the NYMEX. What goes on down there?

Grisanti: Well, Mike, we still get to see the screens, where things are trading. There is a little bit of paper that still comes into the rings, especially in the options market. But basically I treat it as an office, and a place to gather information. So I still talk to my old clients, because I really don’t keep many anymore. And I'm still able to do my business from down there, because I have a computer and everything else. But all of the trading is mostly done on the computer.

Norman: I’ll tell you, I miss it. Back in the heyday, I was back there in the ’80s and the ’90s. It was the open outcry system, which some people would argue is actually more efficient than electronic trading. Would you agree with that statement?

Grisanti: I would agree up to a point; I think it’s actually more transparent. When I looked in the ring, and I looked at certain brokers, I knew who they were doing business for, what the business was for, and everything else. Now I look at a computer screen, I don’t know who’s on that screen. And then you have all the black boxes that have taken pretty much over a lot of this trading. So you don’t know what’s real, who wants to actually buy or sell this market, or it’s a black box trying to pick off inequities in the market.

Norman: Well it’s definitely here to stay. So I think we all have to adjust to it. Now you are active in the commodities markets on a daily basis. You host the show Futures Now on CNBC. Why don’t you give us your overview, now, of the commodity space? How is it looking? Obviously, we’re facing potentially the “fiscal cliff,” a global economic slowdown, although growth here in the U.S. seems to be picking up. How does it pan out?

Grisanti: The show itself is focused on commodities. And I've been trading them for 25 years. I think, overall, when you look at the space, there's certainly a lot more interesting commodities than there were five or six years ago. But right now, you’ve seen a lot of things run over the last two years, three years, really since Obama started the QE, the stimulus. You’ve seen gold run. You’ve seen silver run. You’ve seen mostly metals, the oils run. You had the problems last year with the drought. And that caused the grains run.

So everything is really near historical highs right now. And I think when you talk about commodities and the fiscal cliff, if we go over this cliff, I'm looking for a massive sell-off right across the board.