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Commodities
Raw material, standardised into contracts so that a tonne from anywhere is worth the same.
A commodity is a physical thing that has been deliberately stripped of its individuality. Copper from Chile and copper from Zambia trade at one price because an exchange has defined, to the decimal, what counts as copper: 99.9935% purity, in cathodes, in a warehouse it approves.
That standardisation is the whole trick. It lets a Scottish baker lock in the price of wheat in August for bread she will sell in March, and it lets someone with no bakery and no wheat take the other side of that bet. Most commodity trading is the second kind — the physical barrels and bushels change hands at the end of only a small fraction of contracts.
Copper
The metal that wires everything, watched closely enough as an economic indicator to have earned the nickname Dr Copper.
No. 016Crude oil
The most politically consequential commodity in the world, traded in two main benchmarks that most of the planet prices agai…
No. 030Gold
The oldest continuously traded asset on earth, valued almost entirely for the fact that other people value it, and priced in…
No. 004Aluminium
Effectively solidified electricity: light, abundant, and priced mostly by the cost of the power used to smelt it.
No. 010Cocoa
Grown almost entirely in West Africa by smallholders paid a fixed farmgate price, and subject to the most extreme commodity …
No. 011Coffee
A tropical crop from a narrow band of the world, traded in two grades, and prone to some of the most violent price moves in …
No. 038Lithium
The battery metal that went from obscure industrial chemical to strategic asset and back to glut within five years.
No. 041Natural gas
A regional, storage-constrained commodity whose price can multiply tenfold in a cold winter and collapse the following sprin…
No. 042Nickel
A stainless steel and battery metal, and the subject of the most extraordinary market failure in recent exchange history.
No. 056Silver
Half precious metal, half industrial input — which is why it moves like gold with the volatility dial turned up.
No. 062Uranium
A commodity sold mostly under multi-year contracts to a few dozen buyers, where the spot price is a thin sideshow and politi…
No. 066Wheat
The commodity that feeds more people than any other, hedged by farmers and millers and traded on weather forecasts from four…