How the Coordinated Discovery Market (CDM) Could Fix Broken Commodity Markets
If you’ve ever stood in a grocery store staring at a $4 loaf of bread and thought, “How is this so expensive?” You’re not alone. On paper, markets are supposed to do something very simple and very elegant: help producers and consumers find a fair price where supply meets demand. In reality, especially in commodity markets (wheat, oil, cocoa, etc.), it often feels like prices are being pushed around by forces that have little to do with farmers or families, and everything to do with opaque financial systems and high-speed trading.
In a recent conversation on my podcast, I spoke with Noah Healy, a market designer and game theorist, with a background in nuclear engineering. Noah spent years working on a different way to run markets. His invention, the Coordinated Discovery Market (CDM), is a mathematical redesign of how commodity markets could work if they had the goal of making goods cheaper and more stable for consumers, while also more reliable and profitable for producers.
In this article, I frame our conversation in terms of Problem vs. Solution, and fold in reflections from a solo commentary I published afterward on game theory, control systems, and how economic “shock testing” can be used for or against the public.
The Core Problem: Markets That Don’t Serve People
Problem 1: When Traders “Win,” Everyone Else Loses
At the most basic level, a commodity market is supposed to coordinate:
- Farmers and producers (who need predictable prices to plan what to grow or make)
- Millers, shippers, and processors (who turn raw goods into usable products)
- Retailers (who need steady prices to stock their shelves)
- Consumers (who just want to afford bread, gas, coffee, and energy without panic)
In a fair system, traders are like lubricant in the engine. They help to move things along smoothly by absorbing risk, matching buyers and sellers, and providing information. As Noah pointed out however, with the rise of computers and algorithmic trading, that lubricant has transformed into sand in the gears. Computers allow massive amounts of data to be processed in microseconds, and high-frequency trading exploits tiny price changes. The result is a mechanical advantage for professional traders over everyone else.
Farmers and producers don’t have those tools. Consumers don’t. The tug-of-war that used to be between comparable players is now between humans and industrial-grade trading machines. Instead of traders making a reasonable living facilitating trade, the game has shifted toward:“How much can I extract from the farmer on the worst day he can tolerate, and how much can I squeeze from the buyer on the worst day they can tolerate?” Multiply that across wheat, oil, metals, livestock, cocoa, and more, and you get an economy where prices feel disconnected from reality; where the people who actually grow and use real stuff are being pushed to the edge.
Problem 2: The “Death Spiral” of Financialization
Noah used a sobering example: retirement savings. Imagine a world where there’s just one financial asset called “savings.” People buy it when they’re working, sell it when they retire.
If a huge generation (say those born from the 1940s–1960s) all buy during their working years and then all try to sell as they retire, but there aren’t enough young people with good jobs and rising incomes to buy from them, the market value of those savings gets exposed as an illusion.
Add in entry-level jobs are getting harder to get, small businesses are getting squeezed, and local economies are becoming more fragile. That $100,000 median retirement fund starts to look wildly overstated, compared to the real productive capacity underneath it.
Computers and financial engineering can keep the illusion going for a while by making it look like “the market is up,” but if the underlying real economy is not keeping pace, you’re building a paper castle on soft sand. That’s the death spiral, a market system that looks healthy on screens but is quietly undermining the real economy it’s supposed to support.
Problem 3: Markets as the Original “Artificial Intelligence”, Without Transparency
Here’s where my solo commentary and William Cooper’s book Behold a Pale Horse come in. Cooper wrote about something he called “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars,” the idea that you can treat an economy like a control system:
- Select a staple commodity like wheat, gasoline, or sugar
- Create a sudden shock in its price or availability
- Watch how people’s budgets, emotions, and behaviors change
- Measure the “shock waves” through sales, advertising, and other economic signals
Over time, with enough data and computing power, you can build models that predict how the public will react to different shocks, and then use that to steer public behavior in a predictable, programmable way.
Cooper goes into more extreme and conspiratorial territory than I endorse. The core idea is: You can use mathematics, data, and game theory to shock-test an economy and manipulate how people behave.
He talks about economic amplifiers — structures that take a small input (such as an ad, a price change, a policy tweak) and produce a large behavioral output (how much people drive, drink, smoke, and spend). He calls the process of designing these systems game theory: defining inputs, outputs, objectives, and the available power sources, then building mathematical models to steer the public’s behavior.
Whether or not you agree with Cooper’s broader worldview, this much is clear:
- Large institutions use data and algorithms to shape behavior.
- Markets function as an AI made of humans, machines, and incentives.
- The system is largely opaque to the average person.
Just like a black-box AI model, today’s markets spit out prices and signals that we’re expected to trust, even though we don’t know exactly how those prices are produced or who benefits most from the way the machine is wired. This is where Noah’s work is so interesting, and potentially threatening to entrenched interests: he wants to use game theory and algorithms too, in a transparent way that benefits producers and consumers instead of exploiting them.
The Solution: Coordinated Discovery Markets (CDM)
So what is a Coordinated Discovery Market?At a high level, CDM is a redesign of the marketplace that changes how traders get paid and how information flows. It shift things from conflicts of interest to shared interests.
In today’s markets:
- Traders sit between buyers and sellers.
- They profit from the spread — the gap between what buyers pay and what sellers receive. The wider that spread, the more they can make.
There’s a built-in incentive to widen the gap between producers and consumers without breaking the system. In a Coordinated Discovery Market:
- Traders are no longer rewarded for elbowing their way into the middle - they are rewarded for bringing buyers and sellers closer together. Their job becomes: discover accurate prices that keep the system stable and fair.
Think of it like this:
- Today, a trader makes more money when you pay more and the farmer gets less.
- In CDM, a trader makes more money when you pay less and the farmer gets more, as long as the information they provide helps the market coordinate supply and demand accurately.
Same tools (math, data, algorithms), with the incentive function flipped.
What That Means in Real Life
Take the $4 loaf of bread.
- The farmer wants stable prices so he can pay his loans and stay in business.
- The miller needs predictable costs to run his plant.
- The grocery store wants to stock shelves without scaring you away.
- You want bread that doesn’t swing from $3 to $6 overnight.
In a CDM-style system:
- Traders compete to provide useful information about supply, demand, and risks.
- The system rewards them for accuracy, not for exploiting short-term chaos.
- Prices become stable and predictable.
- Producers are able to plan long term and stay in business.
- Consumers get more affordable, less volatile goods.
Noah’s math, which lives in the world of integral equations and control theory, is about minimizing both:
- The cost of being wrong (bad price signals), and
- The cost of forcing the system (over-correcting or manipulating prices).
If you’ve ever tuned a thermostat or watched cruise control work in a car, you’ve seen a tiny version of this. CDM does something similar for whole commodity markets. The goal is not some utopian fantasy where nobody ever loses money. The goal is a better-aligned game:
- Producers are rewarded for producing what the world needs.
- Consumers pay prices that reflect reality, not manipulative games.
- Traders get paid well — for stabilizing the system, not destabilizing it.
Why Isn’t This Already Happening?
If this sounds obviously better, you might wonder: Why aren’t we already using it? That’s where the human side of the story comes in.
Roadblock 1: Entrenched Interests
There is a lot of money being made in the current system.
- Exchanges.
- High-frequency traders.
- Financial institutions that profit from volatility and complexity.
Noah has spoken with insiders who:
- Can’t refute his math.
- Admit the idea is novel and powerful.
- Still walk away with some version of, “We’re not changing the way we do things.”
When your livelihood, status, and system are built on an existing game, a new game, even a better one, can feel like a threat, not an opportunity.
Roadblock 2: Patents, Bureaucracy, and “Quality Control”
To attract serious investment and adoption, Noah pursued a patent on his Coordinated Discovery Market mechanism. That’s where the story veers into something that sounds almost like a plot twist.
In 2019, he received a notice of acceptance from a patent examiner who said, in essence, “This is new. This is better.” When the patent went for final processing however, the acceptance was effectively ignored. Later, higher-level reviewers tried different arguments to deny it.
First it was “This is useless,” (despite acknowledging its mathematical superiority). Then it was, “If granted, it would give him too much control over the economy.” Then, reaching back to old software-patent precedents from the 1970s.Meanwhile, there are existing patents granted for things like delaying computer orders to make them “fair” relative to phone orders, essentially a special kind of clock in a trading system.
We have a situation where trivial tweaks can be patented without much issue, while. new mechanisms that could shift power structures encounter a maze of objections, secrecy, and internal “quality control” departments that aren’t fully transparent.
Whether this is bureaucratic confusion or influenced by major market players, the end result is the same: A potentially transformative idea is slowed down and boxed out, while business-as-usual keeps humming along.
Game Theory for Control vs. Game Theory for the Common Good
Coming back to William Cooper’s description of game theory and economic amplifiers, we can put it this way:
-
Game theory + data + algorithms can be used to:
- Shock-test the public.
- Steer behavior.
- Consolidate control in the hands of a few.
or
-
Game theory + data + algorithms can be used to:
- Coordinate producers and consumers more fairly.
- Stabilize prices and reduce unnecessary volatility.
- Make the economy more resilient and sustainable for everyone.
The tools are the same; the intention and incentive structure are different. Noah’s CDM is the “light side” version of the same mathematical machinery Cooper warned about. It makes the rules of the game transparent; It rewards traders for improving outcomes, not exploiting them; It could make shocks and crises less frequent and less severe, instead of as a way to tighten control.
That may be exactly why some people don’t want a system like this to gain traction: transparent, well-designed markets are harder to rig.
So What Now?
We’re not going to wake up tomorrow in a world where every commodity market is running on a Coordinated Discovery Market. The path forward is clear:
- Pilot projects – Noah is in conversation with several groups (including in West Africa around cocoa, and various other commodities) exploring early implementations.
- Regulatory pathways – Any new market mechanism has to meet regulatory requirements, which takes time, money, and political will.
- Public pressure and awareness – Farmers, consumers, and enlightened investors are increasingly frustrated with a system that feels rigged and brittle.
For me, the big takeaway from the interview and my own reading is we don’t have to accept today’s markets as some kind of unchangeable law of nature. They are systems designed by humans, and they can be redesigned. Game theory and algorithms are already being used to shape your economic life. The question is who they’re serving: a narrow band of insiders who profit from complexity and chaos? Or a broader coalition of producers, consumers, and honest traders who want a stable, prosperous, and sustainable world?
Noah Healy’s Coordinated Discovery Market is one serious attempt to answer that question on the side of the public. If markets have felt broken to you, you’re not imagining it.
Broken systems are design problems.
Design problems can be solved.
Editor’s Note: This article is based on my podcast interview with Noah Healy, published on October 22, 2024. The ideas discussed here originate from that conversation. The structure, emphasis, and commentary are my own. Any errors or interpretations should be attributed to me, not to Noah Healy.
If you haven't heard my full conversation with Noah Healy
Listen or Watch:
SHOW NOTES:
1. Website: http://coordisc.com
2. Patent pending: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160358256A1
3. White paper: https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.229/246.5fc.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CDM_whitepaper.pdf
4. Video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8aOEcDV7MA
5. Short video: http://coordisc.com/video-explanation
6. Noah’s Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the4thage
7. LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-healy
8. Petition https://www.change.org/CDM_patent
Solo commentary NOTES:
“How William Cooper and his book ‘Behold a Pale Horse’ planted seeds of Qanon conspiracy theory,” by Richard Ruelas and Rob O’Dell. The Arizona Republic, October 1, 2020. Link: https://www.azcentral.com/in-depth/news/local/arizona-investigations/2020/10/01/behold-pale-horse-how-william-cooper-planted-seeds-qanon-theory/3488115001/
Behold a Pale Horse by Milton William Cooper:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/behold-a-pale-horse-milton-william-cooper/1100820296
This article helps you think clearly in a noisy world, cut through misinformation, and find solutions as applied to a better market place, lower prices, fair trade, and a stable economy.