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Exploring Futures in Commodity Markets

Last updated: August 21, 2024

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:

Find and navigate commodity futures widgets

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):

Commodity futures historical settle per contract widget

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.