This chart tells a brutal story about size, and in markets, size matters because it shapes where capital can go and how violently prices can move.
Look at the gap. US equities sit at roughly 72.7 trillion dollars. Privately owned US Treasuries are around 25.5 trillion. Then the chart drops off a cliff. Oil open interest is only about 549 billion, gold 199 billion, copper 190 billion, silver 51 billion, platinum 5 billion, and palladium just 2 billion. That is not a small difference. That is a different universe.
The big macro takeaway is simple: commodity markets are tiny compared with bond and equity markets. Tiny markets do not need massive money flows to create massive price reactions. When large pools of capital even begin rotating toward commodities, the impact can be outsized because the doorway is narrow and the crowd behind it is enormous.
That is why commodities often feel explosive. A modest reallocation out of stocks or bonds can hit oil, copper, silver, or gold like a fire hose hitting a garden pipe. Prices can move fast not only because fundamentals tighten, but because the market structure itself is small.
This also explains why commodity bull markets can look irrational to people trained only on equities. In stocks, huge capital pools can absorb flows more smoothly. In commodities, the market depth is thinner, the float is smaller, and the reaction function is sharper.
So this image is really showing leverage without debt. Not balance sheet leverage, but size leverage. Commodity markets are small enough that when macro money turns, price can do the talking very quickly.
