All Commodities
Every fact sheet in the handbook, grouped by market family.
The only commodity that is also a currency: 5,000 years of monetary history, repriced daily in a London auction.
Half money, half machine part: the metal that lost photography and found the sun.
Thirty times rarer than gold, cheaper than gold since 2015, and waiting on the hydrogen economy.
The metal that rode the gasoline engine from $200 to $3,400 and is now riding it back down.
The commodity that is barely one: no futures, no fungible grade, a century of cartel-built scarcity and invented demand, now being undercut by stones grown in a lab.
The metal of electrification: every grid upgrade, EV, and data center is a copper order.
Congealed electricity: every tonne of aluminium is roughly 14 megawatt hours of power in solid form.
The metal that broke its own exchange in 2022, then drowned in Indonesian supply.
The rust-proofing metal whose price is really a story about smelter economics.
The quietest LME metal: a closed battery loop where roughly four of every five tonnes are recycled.
The smallest LME market, soldered into every circuit board on earth.
The biggest dry bulk trade on earth, priced one shipload at a time since the 2010 benchmark collapse.
The largest metal market on earth by far, made in China, split between the blast furnace and the electric arc, and priced off rebar and hot-rolled coil.
The two ferrous futures that actually trade: US hot-rolled coil and, oddly, the scrap shipped to Turkey.
The white powder between bauxite and aluminium, where one disruption in Guinea sent the price on a record round trip.
The lightest metal rode an 80,000-dollar rocket up in 2022 and a 90 percent crash back down, all before most of the world learned how it was priced.
Three quarters of the world's cobalt comes out of one country, and in 2025 that country discovered it could behave like OPEC.
After a decade in the wilderness following Fukushima, uranium tripled in three years because hedge funds, utilities, and AI data centers all wanted the same pounds.
Seventeen elements nobody can pronounce, refined almost entirely in one country, sitting inside every motor, missile, and wind turbine the other countries want to build.
The refined silicon that becomes solar panels, a market China almost entirely owns, with a brand-new futures contract launched at the bottom of a brutal crash.
Light sweet crude priced at a pipeline crossroads in Oklahoma, traded on the deepest futures contract in any commodity.
The waterborne Atlantic basin benchmark that sets the price for most of the world's internationally traded crude.
The medium sour Gulf marker that prices the crude flowing east from the Middle East to Asia's refineries.
The blendstock that becomes American gasoline once ethanol goes in at the terminal rack.
The workhorse distillate: 15 parts per million sulphur, delivered in New York Harbor, pricing trucks, trains, tractors, and furnaces.
Europe's distillate anchor: 100-tonne lots of 10 ppm diesel delivered by barge in the ARA hub.
The fuel of flight has no futures contract of its own: it trades as a differential to diesel, assessed daily by Platts.
Created by regulatory decree on January 1, 2020: the 0.5% sulphur fuel that powers the world's merchant fleet.
The lightest liquid cut: gasoline's feedstock in the West, the steam cracker's diet in the East.
The price of American gas at a Louisiana pipeline junction, now the supply anchor of the entire global LNG market.
A virtual trading point on the Dutch grid that became the price of European energy security.
The spot price of a liquefied gas cargo delivered to Northeast Asia, and the third corner of the global gas triangle.
The fuel the West retired and Asia did not: still the largest single source of electricity on earth.
The only commodity that must be made and consumed in the same instant, priced every five minutes at thousands of points on the grid.
Electricity for a continent that cannot store it, coupled into one price, set by gas and increasingly turned negative by the sun.
Metallurgical coal, the high-grade coal baked into coke for blast-furnace steel, scarcer and far dearer than the thermal coal burned for power.
The molecule America once burned as gas now crosses oceans in purpose-built ships to feed the world's crackers.
One molecule, two lives: rural heating fuel in a Minnesota winter and cracker feedstock in a Shandong PDH plant.
The C4 of the NGL barrel: normal butane for winter gasoline, isobutane for the refinery alkylation unit.
Pentanes plus, the heaviest NGL: half gasoline blendstock and half the diluent that lets Canadian bitumen flow through a pipe.
The most produced organic chemical on earth, and in 2026 there is far too much capacity to make it.
Once a refinery afterthought, propylene is now made on purpose in dedicated plants, mostly in China, mostly unprofitably.
The six-carbon ring at the root of styrene, nylon, and polycarbonate, pulled between the chemical industry and the gasoline pool.
The two plastics that wrap, carry, and contain the modern world, now trading futures in Dalian deeper than any Western resin market.
The simplest alcohol and a chemical building block, made from gas in the West and coal in China, with the world's only liquid futures market in Zhengzhou.
Purified terephthalic acid, the feedstock for polyester, and one of the most actively traded commodity futures on earth, all of it in China.
Monoethylene glycol, the other half of polyester and the antifreeze in your car, traded on Dalian alongside PTA.
Polyvinyl chloride, the world's third plastic and the material of pipes and window frames, traded on Dalian and tied to Chinese construction.
The monomer behind the foam coffee cup and the LEGO brick, made from benzene and ethylene, traded on Dalian.
One of the oldest and most essential commodities on earth, mostly a chemical feedstock and road de-icer, and one of the very few never financialized.
The biggest crop on earth, feeding livestock, fueling cars, and anchoring the oldest futures market in the world. Americans call it corn; most of the world calls it maize.
The bread grain whose price is now set on the Black Sea, not the Great Plains.
The oilseed superpower crop: grown in the Americas, crushed everywhere, and bought above all by China.
The protein that feeds the world's chickens and pigs, priced in Chicago and shipped from Rosario.
The cooking oil that renewable diesel turned into an energy commodity.
Two species, two exchanges, one drink: the premium bean that broke a 50-year price record, and the hardy one that powers the world's instant coffee.
Raw in New York, refined in London, and priced off Brazilian cane mills that can make fuel instead.
The fiber that clothed the industrial revolution and once spiked to prices unseen since the American Civil War.
The chocolate bean that quadrupled in 2024 and shattered a record that had stood since 1977.
The world's biggest vegetable oil, priced in ringgit in Kuala Lumpur and burned increasingly as Indonesian biodiesel.
The breakfast-table future that went vertical as disease wiped out Florida's groves.
Record beef prices on the smallest American herd since 1951, with a flesh-eating parasite closing the border.
America's pork benchmark, cash-settled against carcasses, with China's vast hog herd as the global swing factor.
The staple food for more than half the planet, grown and eaten in Asia, and so thinly traded that one country's export ban can reorder the world.
The world's fifth cereal and a staple for half a billion people, yet invisible in Western supermarkets: a drought-proof grain with no futures, priced as a corn substitute and sold mostly to China.
The world's fourth cereal and one of its oldest crops, split between the feed trough and the beer glass, with a thin futures market and a trade flow that runs through China and the Gulf.
The cereal the horse built and the engine destroyed, now the smallest contract in the Chicago grain pit, kept alive by breakfast, by rotations, and lately by a carton of oat milk.
The bread grain of the poor northern soils, halved and halved again since 1961, now fed to pigs, sown to be killed as a cover crop, distilled into whiskey, and priced without a futures market anywhere on earth.
A drought-proof root that feeds roughly 800 million people across the tropics, poisonous until processed, born in the Amazon and now the calorie backbone of Africa, with no futures market and a trade that runs from Thailand to China.
A tropical tree crop tied to cars and global trade, irreplaceable in heavy-duty and aircraft tires, and squeezed by disease and aging plantations into a multi-year high.
One of the largest crops in America by acreage, and almost the only one with no futures market.
The world's biggest non-cereal food crop, sold mostly on processor contracts, and so resistant to a futures market that its one famous contract ended in the largest delivery default in US history.
The perishable foundation of all dairy, priced in regulated US classes and discovered globally at a twice-monthly New Zealand powder auction.
The biggest single use of milk, and the price that sets what American dairy farmers earn.
Concentrated milk fat, dominated invisibly by Indian ghee and prone to violent European shortages.
The world's most exported fruit, run by an oligopoly on fixed-price contracts, with no futures market and a single clone facing an incurable disease.
"Green gold": a single-variety fruit with no futures market, dominated by Mexico, spiked by the Super Bowl, and now flowing from Kenya to China.
A Mediterranean crop concentrated in Spain, with no live futures market and a 2024 drought spike that tripled prices.
A heterogeneous luxury crop with no true futures exchange, where "wine futures" means buying Bordeaux in the barrel and the secondary market is a fine-wine index.
The alcohol that actually trades: corn and sugarcane distilled into fuel, blended into the world's gasoline, and hedged on two continents.
Dozens of distinct crops with no global exchange, dominated by India, and the rare farm goods whose only real futures trade in cumin, coriander, turmeric, and cardamom.
Almonds to hazelnuts: a set of high-value orchard crops, each concentrated in one or two origins, and none with a futures market.
One of the CME's founding futures contracts, long since delisted, now a cash market whose price is set by bird flu.
The world's largest and cheapest meat, grown in six weeks by vertically integrated giants, and priced by the cut rather than on an exchange.
A farmed premium protein, half of it from Norway, and one of the very few fish with a real futures market.
Two markets in one fish: a five-million-tonne canned commodity built on skipjack, and a luxury sashimi trade where a single bluefin can sell for millions at a Tokyo auction. Neither has a futures market.
The world's most consumed drink after water, dominated by China and India, and sold the old way: by auction, with no futures market.
A high-value, intensely perishable category, strawberries the giant and blueberries the boom, sold by contract and brand with no futures, and quietly controlled by proprietary genetics.
Among the largest crops on earth by tonnage, almost none trade on a futures exchange, and onions are the one commodity the US has banned outright.
The most perishable thing in world trade, cleared on a descending-price clock in the Netherlands, and the birthplace of the first speculative bubble.
The oilseed Canada invented and named, crushed for cooking oil, animal feed, and now biodiesel, with its own futures in Winnipeg and Paris.
The fourth of the big four vegetable oils, pressed from seeds not petals, and so dominated by Ukraine and Russia that a single war moved the world's cooking-oil price.
Softwood two-by-fours, the most volatile building material, whose 2020-2021 moonshot added tens of thousands of dollars to the price of a house.
Two crops in one plant: the only fibre that becomes linen, grown in a damp European coastal belt, and a minor oilseed grown on the dry steppe, with no real futures market for either.
The rope-and-sailcloth fibre that built navies, was banned for looking like its intoxicating cousin, came back for a molecule nobody could sell, and still has no futures market.
The original performance fibre, sold by auction in Australia and tracked by the Eastern Market Indicator: a market synthetics shrank to a premium niche and a 1991 stockpile collapse nearly destroyed.
Bees are working livestock whose biggest paycheck is pollination, not honey: a no-futures market shadowed by cheap sugar on price and by collapsing colonies on supply.
Wood turned to fibre: a global commodity bigger than lumber, with Brazilian eucalyptus pulp, Nordic softwood, a Shanghai futures contract, and a paper market splitting between dying print and booming packaging.
The world's most traded fertilizer: natural gas converted into 46 percent nitrogen and shipped by the bulk carrier.
The building block of all nitrogen, and a candidate clean fuel: natural gas plus air, under pressure.
Mined rock, sulphuric acid, and ammonia combined into the phosphorus that builds roots and seeds.
Mined potassium chloride: the simplest of the three nutrients, and the one a 2022 sanctions shock rewired.
The price of moving the world's rocks and grain: the most cyclical market in commodities and a real-time pulse of global trade.
The cost of floating two million barrels of crude across an ocean: a leveraged bet on oil trade flows, priced in Worldscale and watched through the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index.
The cost of shipping refined fuel to where it is burned: a market reshaped by the great post-2022 reshuffle of the world's refineries, tracked through the Baltic Clean Tanker Index.
The cost of shipping a box from Shanghai to the world, the youngest freight futures, twice sent to extremes by a pandemic and a war.
A commodity conjured entirely from legislation: the right to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide in Europe.
The other carbon markets: California-Quebec allowances and the Northeast's power-sector RGGI, traded on ICE and separate from Europe's EUA.
Renewable Identification Numbers: the biofuel-blending credits that sit on top of every gallon of US fuel, set by an EPA mandate and swinging from pennies to dollars on a rule change.
California Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits: a tonne of carbon you abated by selling a cleaner transport fuel, whose price collapsed when the program worked too well.
One certificate per megawatt hour of green electricity: the instrument that lets a company claim "100% renewable" and a state enforce a clean-power mandate.
One tonne of carbon, voluntarily offset: a market built on trust that a 2023 investigation badly shook, where a credit can cost a dollar or a thousand.
The credits one carmaker sells another to stay legal: the multi-billion-dollar market that paid Tesla's bills for years, traded entirely off-exchange.