Board Broker

Categories: Derivatives, Trading, Stocks

Ever heard people speculating on future prices of corn, wheat, oil, metals, and pork bellies? Well...this is the world of commodities trading.

Just like a broker on a traditional stock exchange, there are commodities exchange board brokers who provide price quotations, create markets, and handle buy and sell orders from customers. For a broker to maintain a high level of commission, he or she must have great knowledge of the markets they serve, strong risk management—and a lot of luck.

Board brokers generally specialize, because like...what does a pork bellies trader know about oil? It’s a little sad to contemplate, but board brokers are starting to become a thing of the past. There is simply not as much price volatility in the commodities markets anymore, and future price forecasting is difficult with crazy weather patterns, tariff wars, and currency devaluations. Computers can handle just about everything a broker does in less than a second, but can it go out and find a market for potash?

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Finance: What is speculation?6 Views

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Finance a la shmoop what is speculation? wild bets crazy dreams invested upon the [Man placing bet and woman dreaming about money]

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state lottery betting the ranch on red

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drilling randomly on street corners hoping to find oil you don't want to do

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that all right that's speculation the opposite of speculation in a sense is

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well just real investing that is doing research on a company or an industry

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finding the megatrend it feeds into and doing the math on its earnings and [Man completing math work]

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realizing that the company will in fact in two years earn more like five bucks a

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share rather than three bucks a share that well everyone on Wall Street ie the

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stock brokers are publishing and predicting speculation is just kind of

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throwing money at things on a wing and a prayer and you know hoping for that

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miracle yeah but doesn't usually happen so just be an investor

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)