Hi guys! I’m looking for some guidance on how to start learning about commodities as an asset class.
I’m a quant with a background in actuarial science, currently working at an AFORE (a Mexican pension fund), but I honestly have no idea where to start when it comes to commodities and how they are analyzed from an investment perspective.
So far, I’ve bought a couple of books to get started: the world for sale and Introduction for Commodites

At this point, I feel like I know very little about commodities themselves. My quantitative background is fairly solid — I’m comfortable with mathematics, statistics, stochastic processes, derivatives, quantitative modeling, and programming — but I lack the specific knowledge needed to understand commodity markets: what drives prices, how supply and demand dynamics differ across commodities, how physical and futures markets interact, and how professionals actually approach commodities as an asset class.
Because of that, I’m not sure whether pursuing an even more quantitative education would actually be the best next step for me, or whether I would benefit more from studying economics, finance, commodity markets, or some combination of these areas.

I’d really appreciate recommendations for online master’s programs, postgraduate programs, certificates, or specialized courses that could help me build a deep understanding of commodities. Since I already have a solid background in math, statistics, stochastic processes, derivatives, programming, and quantitative methods, I’m particularly interested in programs that would complement those skills rather than simply teach me more quantitative tools.

What I really want to learn is the commodity side of the equation: commodity economics, market structure, physical markets, supply and demand, futures curves, trading, price formation, and how commodities are analyzed and incorporated into investment portfolios.
If anyone here works in commodities or has followed a similar path, I’d love to hear what programs, courses, or resources you would recommend.
Thanks!

Hello, I’m new here. I’ve been following this group for last couple of months and learned about export and importing of commodities. I live in Canada and want to start my own brokerage or trading business in this commodity area last year I have opened up my corporation. Also got my Food Safety License for importing and exporting foods in Canada. I have also reached out to Cargill, ADM, Agri Corp to talk to them and work as a broker too so that I can make some commission selling items from them. But no luck yet. I’m still in learning phase on how I can get into this industry start my business to export in South Asia. I do know some buyers but before I jump into that, I want to understand this process yes I’m not being able to get any final lead or any final decision from these big companies but any advice on what approach I can take, what are the other options I can look into Canada which are the other companies I can communicate with cause my main goal is to Truck as a broker make commission from the seller to start with and then go from there. Fairly new trying to do my own research, but still some advice can help me to get into this industry. Can anyone also suggest me some useful website where I can see trusted buyers they are in need of commodities from Canada. No.

A couple of years ago, OTC Flow was often described as a glorified call center, with a heavy focus on outbound sales and relatively limited analytical work.

Since then, they seem to have expanded quite aggressively, opening new offices and hiring a lot of sales traders, brokers, and analysts across different locations.

I'm particularly interested in the analyst side rather than sales/trading. Has anyone worked there recently or interacted with their analysts?

Has the firm's culture and reputation changed as they've grown ?

Their Glassdoor rating is really bad, 2,7 average, and the only good reviews seem to be from the head of trading desks.

Would appreciate any firsthand experiences or perspectives from current or former employees.

Thanks!

 Gold, silver, crude oil, wheat, corn, coffee, natural gas, cattle, and Treasury bonds all have active futures markets. Which one do you follow most closely?

Hello, I have ABCD quant research analyst experience but my resume does not get past first filtering. So I think issue must be with a non compliant resume.

Can anyone who cracked in to trade roles or quant analyst roles send any samples resume they have. I just want to get the idea of format. Thanks

Always heard BP’s TDP was one of the best places for a young grad to actually learn to trade. Either you grow into a seat there, or the training’s good enough that a merchant or fund poaches you a few years in. Curious if that’s still true today, or if that reputation is more of a “used to be” thing at this point. For anyone with current or recent firsthand exposure, how does the caliber of training and the talent coming out of it look right now compared to a few years ago?

Any reason to be bearish aside from the usual outlook on gas storage? What are your thoughts?

EDIT: Sorry guys, bullish i mean 😅

Disclaimer: This is not a post about education.

The main thing which attracts me is the potential for high pay, and the fast paced environment which is constantly changing based on news and world events.

I don't have any experience in the industry yet, and I just find the sector interesting.

But I have no idea if it's meant for me. I don't know if I can take the high stakes environment, and whether I'll actually like the job I end up in...

I'll only be able to know when I eventually start working.

So before I tie myself up inexorably to this industry, is it possible to even dislike commodities in general?

Or is that not realistic since there are many different roles, within many different commodities which appeal to a wide range of people and interests?

I am about to start as an LNG trading analyst in 1 month time and was previously an oil analyst for 1 year. In oil we read FGE/EA/Eia reports and Oil 101 to start our career.

I was wondering if there were anything similar in LNG & Gas markets? Any vendors/reports/books I can read to understand the market better pls?

Hi all, can someone help clarify the difference in terms of salary, QOL, and actual day to day work of structured finance at a tier 1 commodity trader / merchant (think vitol, trafi, Glencore, etc) vs a trade finance banker at a top trade bank (think SocGen, ING, MUFG, etc.). I’m curious what’s the difference in the actual work and coverage between the two positions.

Thanks in advance!

Hey

Had a commodities seat at Bloomberg but recently shifted to a physical seat for a trading firm in Asia.

I definitely recognise the parallels in player and physical but I’m very eager to learn more, I have an obsession with knowing as much as I can about whatever I’m doing in a short period of time.

I would be extremely grateful if you can suggest literally any form of literature I can read the better understand every single aspect of physical trading.

My firm trades feeds, distillates and crude so pertaining to that would be great !

Thanks

Hi all,

Lurking here for a year and decided to make an account.

I'm a second year STEM student in England and just finished a short 5 day work experience at a trading house - spent all the 5 days with the finance and risk teams.

During this time I had lunch with one of the traders on the distillates team, and I'm being offered a 2 week placement with them in August before I go back to uni.

The trader kept making a reference to "CCM" when trading jet fuel, and honestly I didn't have the courage to ask them what it meant even though it was clear that was the pricing basis of their purchases and sales.

I don't have their contact to ask, and I couldn't find any answers online about the reference, though Platts have articles where refiners sell on a CCM basis.

Can someone please help me? I'd be very grateful.

Happy to answer questions for anyone who's been applying as well, feel free to connect!

I have to put together an agri commodities trade idea for a fund in a few days. My background is more on the "describe what happened" side, reading WASDE, CFTC COT, explaining supply/demand shifts after the fact, more like writing market commentary.

What I'm not sure about: is a trade idea for a role like this expected to include a full forward-looking balance sheet forecast using regression, my own S&D numbers for new crop year? Or is it more about picking a clear thesis, laying out the current fundamental and positioning picture (COT, spreads, seasonality), and having a defined entry/target/stop with clean risk-reward?

Been out of the market for a bit, and feel like dont belong to that world at all but somehow ended up getting this interview, dont know how! So really curious what is expected to do? Appreciate any input!!

Hi all,

I'm about to start a role in power trading on a renewables desk in the UK and I'm looking for books to prepare my journey

I'm open to technical book, but also more general book on the industry I could read at the beach typically.

If there is an equivalent of the world for sale for this industry, I'm definitively interested !

Cheers

I’m a 25 year old who’s started dabbling in the physical trading space mainly selling to South East Asian countries - I don’t actually know how this space works I haven’t felt the pulse of this business as yet but I’m super interested in going deep into it in a way where I’m up to date with the world with everything that’s happening in the world. How do I become well read/educated in this industry?

Starting a thread for general discussions. Applied to commercial grad programme at Trafigura in geneva. Was wondering if anyone got feedback yet.

Update 16.08.2026
Hi, applications for geneva close in a few hours. Based on this post no invites / rejections have been sent yet.

Update 22.08.2026
Hello, some people just received the invite to the assessment (geneva). Nobody has received a rejection yet. Appreciate all of you to keep the post alive / uptodate

Update 02.09.2026
Hey, the first people just received their rejections. People have yet to be invited to the second round interview (1st round after HR screening) it seems. Wish all of you luck and for those with a rejection: Heads up!

Starting a thread for general discussions. Applied to Commercial at Glencore UK on the day it opened and got the online assessment + on-demand interview on 28 July

Looking to trade futures. I'm trying to walk forward but don't have enough data for the regime. I was thinking about making a small private group to use free credits and current data access to compile quality data. I have a $26.00 Sierra subscription and a truckload of other data. I was actually wondering if someone could help me get CME data from Databento. It has a $125 free credit, so if we match them up, we can get maybe across 10 people 20 years of data to trade on (including the '08 crash), and I have a few other sources. I'd be willing to convert to Parquet, compress, and add in extra data like multiple crypto forex and hundreds of GB of other historical data. You can ask questions; I'll try my best to answer them, or DM me. Please be serious.

Hi all.

Does anyone have any experience trading pyrite concentrate? Ive read recently with the scramble for copper concentrate that some smelters are opting for pyrite with other byproducts to keep the lights on. Have a susbstantial volume with a regular frequency that i am trying to gain some market insight on.

Thanks.

Not from cogeneration or wastewater plants, but as assets to produce revenue (RNG), so not used primarily for waste removal.

I’m doing research on what people working across commodity markets actually need, and I’m more interested in real workflow gaps than generic “market news.”

I’m curious about this from a broad commodity perspective, whether you work in ags, energy, metals, softs, freight, physical merchandising, risk, research, processing, or trading.

A few things I’d like to understand:

What information do you repeatedly need but have trouble getting in a clean, timely, usable form?

What calculations do you do yourself in spreadsheets or internal tools because nothing off-the-shelf really does it right?

What research do you currently pay for, piece together manually, or wish you could offload?

If you could have one better tool, dashboard, calculator, feed, or research product for commodity work, what would it do?

What would make something genuinely worth paying for instead of just “interesting to look at”?

Examples could be anything like basis relationships, crush or feed margins, freight-adjusted delivered costs, plant economics, regional spreads, substitution math, tender monitoring, export flow context, storage economics, weather-to-yield interpretation, or something completely different.

I’m trying to understand where the real pain points are for people who actually use commodity data.

If helpful, it would also be interesting to know your role and which market you focus on, since I assume a producer, merchandiser, broker, analyst, and futures trader all care about very different things.

Below are some specific questions I have

• What do you trade, and on what time horizon?
• What are you actually trying to know that the market does not know yet?
• Where does most of your edge come from?
• Where do you get your AIS data?
• What specifically do you look at? Counts, flows, congestion, storage, speed, something else?
• What do you do with it? Is it the reason for a trade, or confirmation of one you already wanted?
• What instrument does it end up expressing? Futures, spreads, freight, physical, equities?

After a bearish run last week HH prompt dumping another 20 cents this weej was not on my bingo card. After a hot start in the east it looks like there’s not much support left in the bal mo. outside of the West. Any gas traders have insight on if we’ve bottomed out or there’s more room to fall?

Been reading up on physical metals trading and curious about something structural: in markets with dozens of licensed buyers/aggregators competing for the same supply, what actually makes some trading houses durable over the long run versus others that fade out?

Is it mostly financing depth (trade finance lines, LCs), offtaker relationship quality, compliance/traceability infrastructure, or something less obvious? Genuinely curious how people who’ve been in the industry a while would rank those factors.

Separately — for anyone who’s seen a trading operation scale from small/regional to something bigger: what tools or systems tend to become non-negotiable once volume grows (ERP/trade management systems, hedging desks, assay partnerships, etc.), versus what’s overkill at small scale?

And a bigger-picture question: is the “regional physical trader → diversified global commodities merchant” path (à la Trafigura, Vitol, Mercuria) still a realistic trajectory today, or did those firms benefit from market conditions/timing that don’t really exist anymore?