Panskeptic

Taking iPath DJ Livestock Cow out of the Barn

I didn't mean sarcasm as in "put down," I meant sarcasm as in "dangerous."

We're often told to regard the stock market as a machine to take our money away that must be outsmarted. Well, the commodity markets are like that only much, much worse. It really is like catching javelins, as newby purchasers of commodity ETFs are discovering.

Google "ag futures" or "commodity futures" or "ag futures brokers" or "ag futures charts" and further such combinations. You'll turn up a lot of sites, some of which are more useful than others. One of them with a good Resources list is

www.site-by-site.com/u...

New and strange territory for us stock jockeys. But soybeans have made many millionaires, so there must be a way.

Taking iPath DJ Livestock Cow out of the Barn

Technical analysis works a lot better here if you consult the charts that commodity traders use. They're all over the Web, but nobody seems to be looking for them.

Traditional stock charts are helpless in identifying recurring seasonal patterns in multiple ag contracts (e.g. planting season), and have no predictive power on weather-related commodities.

You've got to treat these ETFs according to their underlying commodities - they may be registered as stocks, but they don't behave like them.

Think of them as apparently rudderless closed-end funds, actually managed by invisible and capricious minor deities. Does that help?