Commodity Trader
Categories: Careers, Trading, Derivatives
A commodity trader is a person or business that engages in the trading of physical commodities like gold, copper, silver, oil, pork bellies, and even frozen concentrated orange juice. These commodities are commonly used at the beginning of a production value chain and end up as consumer products, construction, or animal feed.
Commodity trader jobs were glorified and spoofed in the 1982 film Trading Places. In this film, Eddie Murphy’s character (a homeless criminal) proved that anyone with a pulse could do this job after seven minutes of training. How the character of Billy Valentine was able to trade for the Duke Brothers without FINRA and education requirements remains a great mystery, as the job also requires (through the Commodity Exchange Act) passage of the National Commodity Futures (Series 3) examination and registration with the National Futures Association (NFA).
Commodity traders really like talking about geopolitical events, even in the company of people who are more interested in talking about pop culture. They will ask people randomly “Where do you think that the price of oil is heading?” just so that they can answer that question moments later by repeating something that they read in S&P Global Platts or Bloomberg earlier that day.
Commodity traders have largely been replaced by computers at the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the number of commodity funds has declined in recent years. These trends have fueled an incredible uptick in the number of recently hired bartenders all across the Windy City. They also have been known to get really excited about Bitcoin when other commodity prices decline or remain stagnant for extended periods of time.
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Finance: What Are Commodities?74 Views
Finance allah shmoop What are commodities This is a comm
owed And this is my monnet ease And neither of
them have anything to do with commodities though if you
say them fast enough well you'll never mind A commodity
is something that is common like it's everywhere See the
com o there for the big hand Like gold is
a commodity it's everywhere oil is a commodity it's everywhere
seven hundred fourteen page paperback copy of moby dick is
a commodity and yes we can't resist clueless politicians are
a commodity as well Well a commodity is basically the
same thing no matter where and how you buy it
That copy of moby dick is the same copy whether
you get it at your local bookstore If a physical
book stores even exist anymore or on amazon the serial
killer of those aforementioned book stores So if something is
the same everywhere well what would be the opposite Well
how about a swim lesson from michael phelps You know
you can't buy that on amazon Not yet anyway Or
say you want to be the proud owner of a
three headed dog Well you might be able to find
one somewhere but it's going to cost you a whole
lot of kibble Or what if you were looking to
buy a blouse like one that was worn by j
edgar hoover Well those are pretty uncommon and or unique
commodities Well the basic idea is that most commodities can
be sold by lots of people so their profit margins
are generally low They may sell an extreme volume but
if you have thirty people competing to sell you that
same copy of moby dick don't don't you think the
last guy just desperate to get it off his shelves
will drop the price really low and you'll take it
Yeah unfortunately then you have to read that book That 00:01:41.357 --> [endTime] book really will be your way