The New England Confectionary Company, NECCO, founded in 1901 by the merger of even older companies. When I was attending MIT in the 1960s, they had a factory a few blocks away and you could often smell the chocolate.
As you probably know, they are most famous for NECCO wafers, the mysteriously awful-yet-wonderful flat, dry, chalky, fragile, thin disks, with pastel colors and faint flavors--strong enough to make them taste different from each other, but not strong enough to identify if you didn't know what they were supposed to be.
They were also the dominant maker of "Sweethearts:"
They collapsed so suddenly that no other candy maker--even ones like Brach's, that actually make their own "conversation hearts"--was ready to gear up in time for Valentine's day.
(In what is surely karma--but good or bad I cannot tell--GE has abandoned its plans for big new headquarters in Boston and is going to move into... old NECCO buildings!)
Anyway, here's my point. Did you see the Sweethearts shortage coming? There had even been an early warning back in April, 2018, when it was reported that manufacture of NECCO wafers had stopped... followed by other reports--ultimately false--that NECCO had been rescued.
It seems now, in hindsight, that someone wise in the ways of balance sheets could have seen disaster ahead, early in 2018, if not before. It would have been easy to buy up Sweethearts in bulk and re-sell them for a tidy profit for Valentines' Day 2019. It wouldn't even have been necessary to do it retail in onesies and twosies. Surely, in theory, one could have found, let's say a small regional chain of some kind of store that would have been interesting in buying thousands of dollars' worth in order to have them when nobody else did. And you could have done this with only a few thousands of dollars, it wouldn't have required millions.
So, I repeat--did you see it coming? I mean, strongly enough to act on, put real money behind it? Not the usual boring thing where you merely think "wow, maybe I should max out my credit card and really do it" and, at the same time, "nah, that would be dumb"--and a year later only remember the "right" thought and forget the "wrong" one.
The other side of the coin, equally important is: if you really had decided to make a serious bulk purchase of Sweethearts in early 2018... how many other candies are sitting in your garage, that you bought on speculation of a shortage, that have not gone up in price?
It is not trivially easy to spot "great buying opportunities" (except in hindsight).
