🚗 Your Guide To Investing In Palladium, A Metal That's Basically Platinum's Competitive Twin

Palladium, along with platinum, is one of 6 in the platinum group metals (PGMs) family. Because metals in the PGM family share similar characteristics, they’re all basically like siblings, with platinum and palladium as the standout twins, competing with each other as the choice of metal for vehicles. In recent years, however, palladium's price has drastically outperformed platinum. Find out more about what affects platinum prices, the types of demand for it, the arguments against platinum, and the different ways you can invest in platinum. Click here to read.

✈️ Your Guide To Investing In Aluminium, One Of The Most Eco-Friendly Metals

Aluminium (or aluminum if you're American or Canadian) is a metal we all know and love. From the foil in the kitchen, to the cans that holds our favourite beverages, to the body of an airplane, and everything in between, it's a metal that's tied to the global economy. So, when everything is going well, aluminium tends to do well. The same is true when things don't go so well, like situation we're in now. Find out more about what affects aluminium prices, the types of demand for it, the arguments against aluminium, and the different ways you can invest in aluminium. Click here to read.

📝 Fundamental Commodity Market Analysis

Fundamental analysis focuses on understanding the supply & demand (key price drivers) of a commodity, & then using this information to determine future trends and how these factors might change in the future. Find out more about the major factors affecting all commodities, as well as some of the key ones that affect individual commodities. Click here to read.

📈 Technical Commodity Market Analysis

Technical analysis focuses on looking at past price movements, identifying patterns and trends, to indicate where prices are likely to move towards in the future. Find out more about the major factors affecting all commodities, as well as some of the key ones that affect individual commodities. Click here to read.

🎓 Your Guide To Investing In Copper, The Metal With A PhD In Economics

Copper, a metal that's heavily used in infrastructure & Industry. Because of all this demand from virtually all aspects of the global economy, some say copper prices can be a reliable indicator for economic health, hence being crowned the only metal with a PhD in economics. Find out more about what affects copper prices, the types of demand for it, the arguments against copper, and the different ways you can invest in copper. Click here to read.

🛢️ Your Guide To Investing In Crude Oil, AKA Liquid Gold

Crude oil is arguably the most important global commodity. Not only is it the most actively traded one, it's also pretty much involved in virtually all aspects of the global economy, from transportation, to industries, to residential, to even consumer goods like cosmetics, electronics and medicines. Find out more about what affects oil prices, the types of demand for it, the arguments against oil, and the different ways you can invest in oil. Click here to read.

⛽ Your Guide To Investing In RBOB Gasoline, The Liquid That Fuels Your Car

RBOB gasoline (Reformulated Blendstock for Oxygenate Blending) is the technical (& trading) term for the petrol/gas for your vehicle. Find out more about what affects gasoline prices, the types of demand for it, the arguments against gasoline, and the different ways you can invest in gasoline. Click here to read.

🏗️ Your Guide To Investing In Steel, The Metal That Helped Industrialise Humanity

Steel, a popular industrial metal used in construction & a number of other industries due to its relatively low cost & strong physical properties. Find out more about what affects steel prices, the types of demand for it, the arguments against steel, and the different ways you can invest in steel. Click here to read.

☕ Your Guide To Investing In Coffee, The Beverage We All Know & Love

From the morning cup, to the afternoon pick-me-up, to the post-dessert cleanser, coffee is pretty much involved in our daily lives. Since a lot of people are involved in the process between bean to your cup, coffee plays a pretty important role in the global economy. Find out more about what affects coffee prices, the types of demand for it, the arguments against coffee, and the different ways you can invest in coffee. Click here to read.

🌽 Your Guide To Investing In Corn, A Surprisingly Versatile Agricultural Commodity

Arguably one of the most important agricultural commodities due to its versatility, corn & its byproducts are used to make a whole range of products, not just for human & livestock consumption. Downstream products include ethanol to be used as a fuel, alcoholic drinks, plastics, deodorants, crayons, batteries, and more. Click here to read.

🍊 Your Guide To Investing In Orange Juice. Yup, It's Also A Financial Asset

Believe it or not, orange juice is also a financial asset. More specifically, the more technical term is FCOJ (frozen concentrated orange juice). It's used as a benchmark for orange juice prices since it's easier & more economical to store & ship around the world. Click here to read.

🍫 Your Guide To Investing In Cocoa, Rich In Taste, Versatile In The Kitchen, Volatile In The Markets

Cocoa beans, the raw form of chocolate, surprisingly has versatility in its commercial uses. Not only that, but the pods that the beans come in is also commercially used. With demand all over the world, cocoa represents an important commodity in the financial markets. So before you take a bite out of that bar of chocolate, just know that it went through a lot to be in your possession. Click here to read.

🍞 Your Guide To Investing In Wheat, The Second Most Consumed Grain In The World

Wheat has been around for tens of thousands of years, cultivated by ancient civilisations across the world. It's easy to grow, stays fresh for a while, & is pretty nutritious. It's the second most consumed grain in the world, the first being rice. Fun fact: wheat grows on every continent apart from Antartica. Click here to read.

🥓 Your Guide To Investing In Lean Hogs, Pork Belly & Pork Cutouts. Yup, Bacon Trading Is A Thing

Believe it or not, lean hogs, pork bellies & pork cutouts are all financially traded commodities, initially created as a risk-management tool for pig farmers & pork producers, protecting them from price volatility in the markets, as well as providing transparent pricing. Click here to read.

🥛 Your Guide To Investing In Soybeans, More Than Just Livestock Feed, Tofu & Soy Milk

A staple ingredient in Asia, soybeans are processed & crushed into two different products: soybean meal & soybean oil. The oil has a number of uses, from industrial, to biofuels, to food. The meal, however, is mostly used as livestock feed, with a small percentage is used to make food products like soy milk, tofu, etc. Click here to read.

💧 Your Guide To Investing In Water, An Increasingly Scarce Commodity

Water is arguably the most important substance on earth. Although you and I don’t think twice about water insecurity, there are some areas where water scarcity is increasingly becoming an issue, which makes water a valuable commodity. Click here to read.

☢️ Your Guide To Investing In Uranium, A Weapon, An Alternative Power Source, & A Financial Asset

Sure, uranium is a dangerous element that poses a threat to humanity if collectively, we let it. However, it also has the potential to transform the energy landscape, providing societies with cleaner energy instead of using fossil fuels. Click here to read.

🍭️ Your Guide To Investing In Sugar. Cakes, Candies & Custard. Why Eat It When You Can Trade It?

Sugar has been around for a long time, dating as far back as thousands of years ago. Fast forward to today, not only is sugar used in food products, it’s also used in a variety of other products & industries (including biofuels), which makes this agricultural commodity quite an important commodity. Click here to read.

🧵 Your Guide To Investing In Cotton. From Textiles, To Soaps, To Bank Notes, Cotton Is More Versatile Than You Think

Cotton, as we all know, is widely used in the textiles industry to create all sorts of clothing & household items. However, it’s not just the cotton fibre itself that gets used. After you take out the fibres, you’re left with cottonseeds, which also has a variety of uses that go beyond textiles & clothes. Click here to read.

🐄 Your Guide To Investing In Live Cattle. Live, Full-Grown Cattle Are Also Tradable Commodities!

Live cattle are basically live, full-grown cows that are ready to be sold, to be sent to slaughterhouses to produce beef as well as a number of by-products. There’s a similar livestock commodity in the market known as feeder cattle, which we'll cover in another article.  Click here to read.

🐄 Your Guide To Investing In Feeder Cattle, The Stage Where Cattle Are Fed Before Becoming Live Cattle

Feeder cattle are cattle that have been placed in feedlots where they’re fed high-energy feed to increase weight gain to become live cattle. Both feeder & live cattle are traded commodities & there are differences between them, the main one being that because you’re relying on the development of a living animal, there are a couple of additional factors that can affect prices. Click here to read.

🌾 Your Guide To Investing In Rough Rice, Arguably The World’s Most Important Grain

Rough rice is slightly different to white or brown rice in that it’s the unmilled and unpolished version that’s harvested directly from the plant. It then gets turned into brown rice by removing the outer hull. Further processing & layer removals then turns brown rice into white rice we all know and love. As a staple crop, rough rice is responsible for feeding more than half of the world's population. Click here to read.

🍷 Your Guide To Investing In Ethanol, Also Known As Alcohol. It’s A Fuel Source, An Antiseptic, And A Recreational Drug

Yes, ethanol (or alcohol) is a tradable commodity, but it isn’t the kind you drink. The difference is that alcoholic beverages contain a percentage of ethanol, a diluted form of the compound, whereas tradable ethanol is the industrial, pure, undiluted version mainly used for fuel. That being said, the ingredients and processes used to make beverage-grade and industrial-grade ethanol is pretty similar, via fermentation of different kinds of grains like corn, wheat, etc. Click here to read.

🔋 Your Guide To Investing In Lithium, The Lightest Metal On Earth, & Is In Our Laptops, Phones, & Electric Cars

Lithium is a soft, silver metal that’s very reactive to air and water. It’s also considered to be the lightest metal, and you can even cut it with a knife! It doesn’t occur naturally in nature, but it’s available as a compound in rocks and brine pools. You might know about lithium because of the battery in your phone, laptop, or Tesla. What makes it the ideal choice to be used as a battery is that lithium-ion batteries has a high capacity to store energy in a small space, while still being lightweight. Click here to read.

🍺 Your Guide To Investing In Barley, An Important Cereal Grain Commodity Used To Make Beer & Whiskey

Before wheat became popular, barley was a major cereal grain in ancient times, believed to be one of the first grains to be widely cultivated. Like wheat, corn, and rice, it’s a cereal grain known to be quite nutritious, packed with vitamins and minerals. You might know that barley is a key ingredient used to make beer and whiskey. It’s also used as livestock feed, making barley quite an important agricultural commodity in the world markets. Click here to read.

🌴 Your Guide To Investing In Palm Oil, A Controversial Oilseed Commodity Used In Lots Of Consumer & Food Products

First things first, all coconut trees are palm trees, but not all palm trees are coconut trees. The palm tree that produces the red palm fruit shown in the picture is different to the palm tree that produces coconuts. The flesh and the seed (or kernel) of the fruit can be processed to make crude palm oil (CPO) and palm kernel oil (PKO) respectively. Click here to read.

🌼 Your Guide To Investing In Canola, An Oilseed Commodity That Produces The “Healthiest” Oil

Canola is a variety of the rapeseed plant, bred and cultivated by Canadian scientists to get rid of the negative properties in rapeseed oil (namely its erucic acid content, with early research suggesting that it’s harmful to human health). Similar to soybeans, it produces both canola meal and canola oil. Because of this, canola is used in both food and non-food products, making it a valuable commodity. Click here to read.

🐑 Your Guide To Investing In Wool, A Surprisingly Versatile Commodity Not Only Used In Textiles

There are actually different types of sheep’s wool, depending on the breed of the sheep. Generally speaking, wool ranges in its thickness, ranging from very fine, to coarse. Because of this, there are many woollen products that can be made, ranging from super soft, lightweight apparel that doesn’t itch, to durable carpets. Freshly sheared wool from a sheep is known as greasy wool, the commodity we’re covering here. It’s called greasy wool because it still has high levels of lanolin, a natural, waxy substance produced by the sheep. This byproduct of wool production also has its uses, with a sizeable global market. Click here to read.

🥣 Your Guide To Investing In Oats, Another Important Cereal Grain Commodity Used As Food & As An Ingredient In Cosmetic Production

When you think of oats, you might think of plain porridge. While you’re not wrong, there’s a lot more to oats than that. Oat millers process harvested oats to produce a bunch of different product types, like flakes, flour, bran, and more, all of which can be used to create a diverse range of nutritious food products (like granola oat bars), allowing the global oats market to continue to grow. Furthermore, you might be surprised to know that oats have inherent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and a number of other properties. This means that oats are used in various personal care products like lotions, creams, and soaps, to act as a cleanser, moisturiser, skin protectant, and as a soothing & anti-inflammatory agent. Click here to read.

🌲 Your Guide To Investing In Random Length Lumber, A Key Commodity Used In Many Industries

Wood itself is used in numerous industries and applications, like fuel, paper, pellets, etc. But the wood we’re talking about today is random length lumber, also known as sawn wood. As its name suggests, it’s made when logs are processed at a sawmill and cut into various sizes of lumber, hence the name random length lumber. There are also different grades of lumber, depending on whether there are any defects on the wood, like dents or chips. But again, for simplicity’s sake, we’re going to talk about financially traded lumber as a standard. Click here to read.

✏️ Your Guide To Investing In Rubber, An Important Commodity Used In Everyday Products

Rubber might not be a glamorous commodity, but like many others, it’s an important one since it’s used in a variety of everyday products across multiple industries. Think condoms, tyres, boots, gloves, erasers, etc. In fact, rubber is so important that it’s on the EU’s list of critical raw materials, a list of commodities with high supply risk. There are actually two kinds of rubber — synthetic and natural rubber. Natural rubber is obtained by “tapping” trees to collect the liquid latex (shown above), which is then used to make rubber. We’ll be focusing on natural rubber in this article since it’s the market standard for rubber. Click here to read.

🔪️ Your Guide To Investing In Nickel, The Popular Base Metal Used To Make Stainless Steel, Among Other Things

When we say nickel, we’re referring to the base metal itself, not the coin used in the US! You might not think of nickel as an investment asset solely because of its association to the coin, but rest assured that nickel is used in many industrial and consumer products, and increasingly, in electric vehicles, making it an important commodity. Part of the reason why it’s not as known as other metal commodities today is because it’s mostly used as an alloy, combined with other metals, to create other products, like stainless steel. However, its use in battery systems (like electric vehicles), though currently representing a small percentage of global nickel demand, certainly presents opportunities for growth in the long-term. Click here to read.

🔋 Your Guide To Investing In Cobalt, The Lesser-Known Metal That’s Essential In Battery Systems

When we say cobalt, you might think of the colour cobalt blue. You’re certainly not wrong. In fact, cobalt-based blue pigments have been used in ancient jewellery, glass and paints. However, there’s much more to cobalt than meets the eye. When talking about lithium-ion batteries, it would be wrong to leave cobalt out of the conversation. This is because although there are a number of battery systems that use little to no cobalt, generally speaking, lithium-cobalt battery systems are safer and more stable. So, this essentially means that cobalt is lithium’s partner, at least in terms of batteries. Click here to read.

🔥 Your Guide To Investing In Natural Gas, A Bridge Between Fossil Fuels & Renewable Energy?

Again, not to be confused with gasoline used in cars! Natural gas mainly consists of methane, but there are other compounds mixed in as well. Natural gas can actually be extracted from many different sources, like coal and shale deposits, trapped between layers of rock underground, or even collected from landfills and animal waste. Natural gas found underground is a non-renewable resource, since it’s formed from dead organic matter over millions of years. This is generally referred to as a fossil fuel. However, natural gas extracted from landfills and processing sewage and waste water is considered a renewable resource, since we can continually keep making it. Click here to read.

🛢️ Your Guide To Investing In Heating Oil, A Natural Gas Alternative Made From Crude Oil

Not to be confused with crude oil, heating oil is made by refining crude oil. As its name suggests, its main use is to heat homes and commercial buildings. You might have a natural gas system or electricity system in your home, but for those who reside in areas that don’t have easy access to main gas lines, heating oil is the ideal choice. It’s generally referred to as a “distillate fuel oil”, categorised alongside other fuel types like diesel, since diesel and heating oil are chemically similar. Since diesel has a higher fuel tax than heating oil, and since they’re both chemically similar, many countries have added coloured dyes to heating oil to catch those evading fuel taxes. Click here to read.

🏗️️ Your Guide To Investing In Molybdenum — The Little-Known Metal Used To Make Important Alloys & Compounds

Chances are, you’ve probably never heard of molybdenum before. This is because not only is it relatively rare since it doesn’t occur naturally as a free metal, its applications are almost exclusively used in the industrial sector. That being said, the metal is quite an important one since it’s used to mix with other metals and create alloys (like steel) with enhanced properties and increased resistance to things like corrosion. Because of this property, molybdenum is used in influential industries and sectors, like the military, nuclear power generation, as well as the chemicals industry, making it an increasingly important commodity. Click here to read.

🔩️️ Your Guide To Investing In Zinc — A Metal Used Mainly As Protection Against Corrosion & Rust

You might know zinc as being one of the essential minerals that the human body needs. While this is true, zinc is also used to protect other metals (namely steel and iron) from rusting and corrosion through galvanisation, a process that involves coating said metal with zinc. This means big infrastructure builds like bridges can be continually maintained and protected against the forces of nature, a more cost-effective solution as opposed to replacing corroded parts. In any case, though galvanisation is the most common use case for zinc, there are also a number of other use cases with applications in various industries, such as cosmetics, aerospace, medicine & farming. Click here to read.

🔋 Your Guide To Investing In Lead— A Metal Used Mainly In Conventional Car Batteries, Among Other Things

Lead is a heavy metal that’s quite dense, but is also soft, malleable, and highly resistant to corrosion. Its use dates back as early as the ancient Egyptians, used in paints and pipes. Nowadays, lead is mostly used in lead-acid batteries, along with a number of other important industrial & commercial products. Numerous studies have shown that excess exposure to lead is harmful to human health, which has led to a decrease in the number of products that can be made with it. That being said, lead is nevertheless still an important commodity in the global markets as its properties makes it the ideal metal to be used in a variety of industrial & commercial products, with essentially little to no risk of lead exposure. Click here to read.

🥫 Your Guide To Investing In Tin — Another Base Metal With Important Industrial Applications, Most Notably In New Electronic Technologies

Tin is actually chemically similar to lead, and tin-lead alloys were pretty common in the past, used in numerous industrial applications, most notably as a solder. However, due to regulatory requirements and the environmental & health risks, lead use in consumer electronics diminished, which led to tin commanding a larger market share of the solder market making up to roughly half of the world’s demand for tin. You might be surprised to know that tin canned goods make up a smaller percentage of tin demand. This is because cans are usually made of steel, with a tin coat to protect the steel from corrosion and to preserve the contents in the can. Click here to read.