Whois & Analysis for platts.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.

S&P Global Platts is a provider of energy and commodities information and a source of benchmark price assessments in the physical energy markets.

The business was started with the foundation in 1909 of the magazine National Petroleum News by Warren C.

Platt.

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.

In physics, energy is the property that must be to an object in order to perform work on – or to heat – the object, and can be converted in form, but not created or destroyed.

The SI unit of energy is the joule, which is the energy transferred to an object by the mechanical work of moving it a distance of 1 metre against a force of 1 newton.

An oil is any neutral, nonpolar chemical substance that is a viscous liquid at ambient temperatures and is both hydrophobic (immiscible with water, literally "water fearing") and lipophilic (miscible with other oils, literally "fat loving").

Oils have a high carbon and hydrogen content and are usually flammable and surface active.