Coal giant Javelin buys its way into cobalt and molybdenum

Javelin Global Commodities made its name, and its fortune, selling the fuel the world says it is trying to quit. Now the coal trading giant is buying into the metals meant to replace it. Javelin has acquired Derek Raphael & Co., a family-owned merchant that deals in molybdenum and cobalt, Bloomberg reported.

Read it as a hedge more than a conversion. Coal has been extraordinarily profitable for Javelin, but each bank, insurer and utility that tightens its fossil-fuel rules narrows the pool of capital willing to back the trade. Cobalt and molybdenum sit on the other side of that ledger. Governments treat them as strategic, and buyers in batteries, steel and defence want to secure them from someone other than a single dominant supplier.

Two former Goldman traders who bet coal would refuse to die

Javelin was built by Peter Bradley and Spencer Sloan, two former Goldman Sachs traders who left the bank around the time it offloaded the last of its coal assets. Their wager was blunt and unfashionable: demand for coal would outlast the pledges to abandon it. Europe’s scramble to replace Russian energy after the invasion of Ukraine made that wager pay, and Javelin grew into the largest exporter of American coal by Bloomberg’s account, competing for cargoes with Glencore and Trafigura.

It has not stayed a pure trader. Japan’s Itochu took an equity stake in the business, and Javelin joined private equity firm Energy Capital Partners in a bid to buy a fleet of US power plants from Blackstone and ArcLight, a package that included Ohio’s Gavin coal plant. Climate campaigners have protested its role in keeping coal moving.

Why cobalt and molybdenum are worth a coal trader’s money

Molybdenum is the quieter of the pair. It hardens and strengthens steel, which puts it inside pipelines, turbines and armour plate. Cobalt is the louder one. It stabilises the cathodes of many lithium-ion batteries and goes into the superalloys of jet engines. Most of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo and refined in China, and that concentration has turned an obscure metal into a matter of industrial policy across Europe and North America.

For a trader, concentration is the opportunity. Physical metals dealing runs on relationships, warehouses and credit lines, and a family firm with a long history in minor metals brings exactly those. Javelin brings a bigger balance sheet and a logistics machine built to move bulk cargoes across oceans.

A metals firm whose founder started out selling coal

The buyer’s identity carries a neat irony. Derek Raphael, the merchant behind the firm, began his career in the coal department of Continental Ore Company in New York, a young trainee told to write to every coal producer he could think of in search of sales to Italian steelworks, according to an interview he gave the Minor Metals Trade Association. His company dealt in ores, ferro-alloys, coal and fertilisers before the trade came to know it for cobalt and molybdenum.

The numbers explain why Javelin can afford to diversify. The firm shipped about 12.7 million tons of coal in 2022, just under 20% of all US coal exports, according to Riverside Shipping data cited by Bloomberg, and it posted record profits that year, topping the $194 million it earned in 2021. Reports in 2023 valued the business at more than $1 billion. Itochu announced its investment in August 2024. Bloomberg reported the Derek Raphael acquisition on November 10, 2026.

The traders who made a fortune betting that coal would refuse to die are now buying a stake in the metals built to outlive it. In commodities, that is not a change of heart. It is the next trade.

Tags: cobalt, coal, critical minerals, Derek Raphael & Co, Javelin Global Commodities, molybdenum