Cakcak Silver

1. Learn the mechanics of the futures markets and futures trading: Everyone wants to skip this step! You can begin separating yourself from the competition by being thorough. I suggest buying a used study manual for the series three licensing exam (Futures broker exam) at Amazon. Two other excellent resources are the books, "Trading and Exchanges" by Larry Harris and "The CRB Commodity Yearbook" put out each year by the Commodity Research Bureau.

2. Observation and study: Start making observations about the markets you want to trade as soon as possible. One good practice is to keep a notebook or journal and to make a habit of recording your observations each day. What types of things should you record? Let me give you an example of a journal entry that focuses on price action: "The Emini (mini SP500 futures contract) has closed higher than the previous day for three days in a row. This was the highest close of the past five trading days. The Range was also the largest of the past five days. The close was in the top 10% of the day's range and we are below the 200 day moving average." After making observations for some time you will likely start to identify patterns. In fact, the pattern I just gave you is actually a useful trading pattern that -if used properly- can generate a high-probability trade!

People who are into spread betting often have a favourite arena where they place their bets. If you are new to spread betting you may want to look around for an arena that you would like to trade in before you really take the plunge. This is not something that you should get into rashly and is in fact one activity that deserves a lot of research if you hope to be successful at it.
One area that a lot of people who are into spread betting really like to get into is the commodities market. You may wonder why this is their favourite arena and this is because it is a highly volatile market that is always changing thus making it a favourite for a lot of people. You may also be wondering what the volatile nature of the commodities will bring you and it just so happens that when you have volatile trading, that means that there are good profits to be made and yet, you must be made aware that if there is money to be had in this market, there is also money to be lost. But that is all part and parcel of this spread betting game.

Over the past decade oil has become a very popular investment theme as demand from China and India as well as other developing countries has pushed demand up to the available supply. At the same time innovative new products such as the Oil ETF have caused a sharp rise in investor demand. As with other commodities the weakness in the U.S. Dollar is the underlying factor that has caused a rise in oil prices over the past decade. Should you be investing in oil? If so, what is the best way to start investing in oil?

When farming transitioned from being a way to provide for the family to a viable commercial business providing for a population the farmer faced a dilemma. With every short growing season they faced uncertainty, what price would they get for their crops when they went to market at harvest time?
Was it going to be an abundant bumper crop year that would drive the market price down or a poor crop resulting in scarcity that would drive the market price up? This uncertainty made it impossible or at least very difficult to run a business. After all, you don't know what you're going to sell your crops for at harvest.
The same could also be said for the buyers of farm produce.
Manufactures of food, ice cream for example, would want to know what their cost of milk will be for the long winter months ahead. They too could not operate with uncertainty and run their business properly without knowing what their cost of supplies will be.
So it only made sense than that the farmer and the manufacture make a deal and agree on an acceptable future price they would commit to each other for. The farmer would know the price for supplying and the manufacture would know the cost for taking delivery of the goods at point in the future.

One of the most common questions I hear in the metals business is, "where do I store my metals?". This question is often posed by a person, foundation or trust that is looking to secure their investments. Usually we hear about buyers of gold, silver, platinum and palladium who want to protect their assets but now there is a growing number of clients who are looking to diversify beyond the core metals we all know so well. How do we best protect our assets today with all the uncertainty? Here I will discuss why a portion of your metals should be stored offshore, and in what form works best.

The metals people most often store outside of the country are gold and silver although experienced metals buyers might also buy platinum and palladium. Recently clients have been able to buy other rare industrial metals like tellurium, cobalt, molybdenum, hafnium, indium and tantalum. A few years ago the average investor would not have had the ability to buy some of these metals unless they owned a company that produced items which needed these rare industrial metals.