Whois & Analysis for fastmarkets.com

A commodity market is a market that trades in primary economic sector rather than manufactured products.

Soft commodities are agricultural products such as wheat, coffee, cocoa and sugar.

Hard commodities are mined, such as gold and oil.

Investors access about 50 major commodity markets worldwide with purely financial transactions increasingly outnumbering physical trades in which goods are delivered.

Futures contracts are the oldest way of investing in commodities.

Futures are secured by physical assets.

Commodity markets can include physical trading and derivatives trading using spot prices, forwards, futures, and options on futures.

Farmers have used a simple form of derivative trading in the commodity market for centuries for price risk management.

Mining is extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth usually from an orebody, lode, vein, seam, reef or placer deposits.

These deposits form a mineralized package that is of economic interest to the miner.

A benchmark crude or marker crude is a crude oil that serves as a reference price for buyers and sellers of crude oil.

There are three primary benchmarks, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), Brent Blend, and Dubai Crude.

Other well-known blends include the OPEC Reference Basket used by OPEC, Tapis Crude which is traded in Singapore, Bonny Light used in Nigeria, Urals oil used in Russia and Mexico's Isthmus.

Energy Intelligence Group publishes a handbook which identified 195 major crude streams or blends in its 2011 edition.

A metal (from Greek μέταλλον métallon, "mine, quarry, metal") is a material (an element, compound, or alloy) that is typically hard, opaque, shiny, and has good electrical and thermal conductivity.

Metals are generally malleable—that is, they can be hammered or pressed permanently out of shape without breaking or cracking—as well as fusible (able to be fused or melted) and ductile (able to be drawn out into a thin wire).

About 91 of the 118 elements in the periodic table are metals, the others are nonmetals or metalloids.

Some elements appear in both metallic and non-metallic forms.

In ordinary usage, price is the quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services.