Tracking Commodity Futures in Oils and Fats, Dairy, and Sugar
Commodity futures in oils and fats, dairy, and sugar provide a window into market expectations, offering insights that help users anticipate price movements and market trends. This forward-looking approach allows for more strategic planning and decision-making.
Benefits of Using Commodity Futures
Price Stability and Hedging Using futures contracts for oils and fats, dairy, and sugar enables businesses to lock in prices for future transactions, providing price stability and effective hedging against market volatility. This helps in managing costs and protecting profit margins.
Strategic Procurement Planning Futures data supports strategic procurement planning by providing insights into future price trends within the oils and fats, dairy, and sugar markets. This helps procurement teams make informed purchasing decisions, ensuring they buy at the best possible prices.
Exploring commodity futures: step-by-step
1. Navigate to the commodity futures dashboard
Use the sidebar. Hover over it and it will automatically expand.
Find Futures and click on it.
2. Use the navigation to find your widget
Once you have selected futures, you can easily navigate between 3 widgets:
- Futures Graph
- Historical Settle per Contract
- Futures Table
You can use the secondary left bar to quickly navigate to the widget of your choice, see screenshot below:
3. Commodity Futures Graph
This graph shows several Futures: EEX (European Exchange), CBOT (Chicago Board of Trade), CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), ICE EU (Intercontinental Exchange) and SGX (Singapore Exchange Limited) and more. The figures displayed are from a month later than the current month to one-year data.
From the dropdown menu you can filter by:
- Futures Exchanges
- Product
- Unit and currency
4. Commodity Futures Historical Settle per Contract
In the historical settle graph you can track the historical price development of all currently traded futures contracts.
The example below looks at food SMP (EEX):
5. Commodity Futures Table
The table shows the futures for several futures exchanges, with the figures displayed from a month later than the current month to one-year data.
Check out the screenshot below to get an idea of how this would help you:
Use Cases for tracking Futures
Trading Firms
A trading firm dealing in palm oil can use commodity futures to hedge against price volatility. By locking in future prices, the firm can manage its cost structures more effectively and mitigate the risks of sudden price spikes.
Food Producers
A dairy producer can leverage futures contracts to secure stable prices for milk and other dairy inputs. This helps in budgeting and maintaining consistent production costs, even when market prices fluctuate.
Sugar Manufacturers
A sugar manufacturer can use futures to anticipate price trends and manage procurement costs for raw sugar. By locking in prices ahead of time, they can protect their margins and plan production more efficiently.
Frequently asked questions
How do commodity futures help a procurement team manage price risk?
Futures contracts let you lock in a price for a future transaction, which provides price stability and hedges against market volatility. For procurement teams in markets like oils and fats, dairy, and sugar, this protects profit margins and makes budgeting more predictable, since input costs are fixed ahead of time even when spot prices later move sharply.
Which futures exchanges does Vesper track for these commodities?
Vesper's futures graph pulls contracts from several major exchanges, including EEX (European Exchange), CBOT (Chicago Board of Trade), CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), ICE EU (Intercontinental Exchange), and SGX (Singapore Exchange), among others. You can filter the view by exchange, product, and unit or currency to focus on the contracts most relevant to your sourcing. See the commodity futures data for details.
What is the difference between the futures graph and the historical settle per contract view?
The futures graph shows forward-looking prices across exchanges, typically from the month after the current one out to about a year ahead, so you can read market expectations. The historical settle per contract view instead tracks the past price development of contracts currently being traded, letting you see how a specific contract's settlement value evolved over time.
Can futures data guide when to buy if my company does not trade contracts directly?
Yes. Even without executing trades, futures act as a forward signal of where the market expects prices to head in oils and fats, dairy, or sugar. Procurement teams use that read to time purchases, decide whether to cover requirements early, and plan production. Vesper's oils and fats price data sits alongside the futures view to support those buying decisions.
