Finding your very own unique commodity trading edge is a worthwhile goal. Perhaps surprisingly, until only about forty years ago, trading futures markets consisted of only a few commodity farm products, however, now they have been joined by a huge number of tradable financial and other tradable products such as precious metals like gold, silver and platinum; livestock such as hogs and cattle; energy contracts such as crude oil and natural gas; foodstuffs like coffee and orange juice; and industrials like lumber and cotton.
Nineteenth century observers of early U.S. futures markets either credited them for stabilizing food prices, or discredited them for wagering on, and intensifying, the economic hardships of Americans (Baer and Saxon 1949, 12-20, 56; Chandler 1977, 212; Ferris 1988, 88; Hoffman 1932, 5; Lurie 1979, 53, 115).



Article 89 Any institution or market that carries out centralized trading according to standard contracts and takes the following trading mechanism at the same time or bears the feature of either of the following trading mechanism without approval of the futures regulatory institution of the State Council shall be regarded as performing futures trading in a disguised form: (1) It provides all buyers and sellers that participate in the centralized trading with a guaranty to perform the contracts; or (2) It adopts the mark to the market system and margin system, and collects a sum of margin that accounts for less than 20 percent of the amount of the subject matter of each contract at the same time.
By contrast, in a shallow and illiquid market, or in a market in which large quantities of the deliverable asset have been deliberately withheld from market participants (an illegal action known as cornering the futures trading market ), the market clearing price for the futures may still represent the balance between supply and demand but the relationship between this price and the expected future price of the asset can break down.

The former Chicago Board of Trade (which became the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a result of a merger in 2007) dates from the mid-19th century when farmers and dealers began to make written commitments to deliver specific amounts of grain for an agreed-upon price.
All CFDs (stocks, indexes, futures), cryptocurrencies, and Forex prices are not provided by exchanges but rather by market makers, and so prices may not be accurate and may differ from the actual market price, meaning prices are indicative and not appropriate for trading purposes.
The farmer sells his corn for the going market price of $2.50 a bushel and closes out his futures contracts trade by buying the contracts back at the lower price of $2.50. Because he had sold short at a price of $3, he makes up the 50-cent market price drop through a 50-cent per bushel profit on his futures trade.

Farmers, ranchers and other food growers along with food producers, petroleum companies who either drill for oil or natural gas or refine these products - or both, financial institutions with enormous holdings in treasuries, equities or currencies, mining interests and their buyers - all these areas of production and distribution employ futures trading spreads from time to time as an important aspect of their businesses.
Futures traders are traditionally placed in one of two groups: hedgers , who have an interest in the underlying asset (which could include an intangible such as an index or interest rate) and are seeking to hedge out the risk of price changes; and speculators , who seek to make a profit by predicting market moves and opening a derivative contract related to the asset "on paper", while they have no practical use for or intent to actually take or make delivery of the underlying asset.