The things the world actually runs on

Four groups: energy (WTI and Brent crude, natural gas), base metals (copper), soft commodities (coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton) and the grain complex (wheat, corn, soybeans). Gold, silver, platinum and palladium are not here — they trade on the precious metals page, because they are priced off interest rates and haven demand rather than off industrial supply and demand.

No. You are trading a CFD on the price, not the underlying contract, so there is no delivery, no storage and no quality inspection. Positions settle in cash in your account currency. That is the practical difference between trading commodities here and trading the futures contract directly, where delivery obligations are real.

Commodities are priced from futures, and each future is for delivery in a specific month. As one contract nears expiry the market moves to the next, and our instrument follows. That roll is applied as a cash adjustment so the position value is unchanged at the moment of the roll — your size and your view carry over untouched, but the price you are now tracking is the new month’s.

Supply, mostly, because it is slow to change. Crude responds to OPEC+ decisions, inventory reports and refinery outages; natural gas to weather and storage levels; copper to construction and manufacturing demand, particularly from China; softs and grains to the weather over the growing regions that dominate each crop. Demand matters, but it rarely moves as fast as a supply shock.

Because supply cannot respond quickly. If a frost damages a coffee crop or a pipeline goes offline, no amount of demand brings the missing supply back in the short term, so the whole adjustment happens in the price. Add thinner liquidity than major FX, and single-digit-percent moves in a day are ordinary rather than exceptional.

Each follows the hours of its home exchange rather than trading around the clock like FX, so the tradable window is shorter and there is a genuine overnight gap between sessions. That gap is why a stop is not a guarantee of your exit price on these instruments: the market can reopen through your level.

They are driven by physical supply rather than interest rates, so they often move independently of equity indices and currencies — which is the useful property. Independent is not the same as safe, though: an uncorrelated instrument with high volatility can still lose money quickly, and correlations tend to converge in a broad market shock.

Smaller than the equivalent notional in FX, as a starting point. Set the size from the distance to your stop and what that loss would be against your balance, not from the margin the platform requires to open it. Given overnight gaps and daily ranges that can be several percent, a position sized off margin alone is easy to get badly wrong.