Way back in college, I remember taking a class on Agricultural Economics and the whole market thing was sort of explained. Now I wish I had listened a little better. Looks like there is some money to be made (and paid) in the whole thing. Anyone have some experience in it?

I learned the basics from the Duke brothers.

"Commodities are agricultural products. Like coffee, that you had for breakfast. Wheat, which is used to make bread. Pork bellies, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. Then there are other commodities like frozen orange juice and gold. Though, of course, gold doesn't grow on trees like oranges."

Don't trade myself but I work as a risk manager for a trading firm.

If your looking to get into it, do some reading, some more reading and top that off with even more reading. Then open a paper trading account and put what you learned to the test.

Chart of the S&P today

Granted this isn't a typical for daily price moves but you could have made or lost big time trading today's Fed Rate decision. I watched a small account lose his whole account in 10 minutes today. We also have a customer thats up 8 figures this year.... Just another day behind the computer screen....

I have about 200oz of Silver 1oz trade units. Wifes grandfather used to work in the AC industry and I guess the terminals on AC units had a bunch of silver in them or somethin. So he had them all melted down / minted into 1oz trade units - .9997% pure. I'm hoping Silver goes through the roof like Gold has.

Gold went from under $300/oz 5 years ago to over $800/oz today.

Not exactly the same as trading on paper tho - I actually have 200oz of silver coins

Been messing around with a practice account in the past day. They give you $50K and the live feeds so you can test theories, learn how things work, etc. Made $10K before going to bed. Of course, decided to test a theory that has me currently losing $2K of that ten - but I'm still ahead. Might try this with real money once the credit cards get paid off.

Trading commodities is a dangerous game. Most traders don't make money doing this... however some people make a *lot* of money. I've heard statistics saying that only 25% of commodity traders turn a profit.

It isn't like trading standard equities. When you invest in most commodities you can't just buy 10K bushels of corn at 3.00 and hang on to it like you can your MSFT stock until it's worth $X and then sell. If the price falls and the contract comes up, well... you've gotta cash out.

You need to be much more aware of the markets when trading commodities than stocks. If you don't understand the market, what makes it move, and what indicators to watch for you will lose money. Trading stocks, you can pretty much get in it for the long haul and have a very high chance of making good profits.

Go to the exchanges. They all have good education sections. (CBOT, CME (GLOBEX), NYMEX are the big ones in Ag and Energy in the US).