Soft commodity cotton, and orange juice. Soft commodities have been known to adopt a backwardation trend until the late 1990s when futures were actively traded. Speculation and investment requirements later shaped the common contango trend. Soft commodity Soft commodities, or softs, are commodities such as coffee, cocoa, sugar, corn, wheat, soybean, fruit and livestock. The term generally refers to commodities that are grown, rather than mined; the latter (such as oil, copper and gold) are known as hard commodities. Soft commodities play a major part in the futures market. They are used by farmers wishing to lock-in the future prices of their
Commodity swap Commodity swap A commodity swap is a type of swap agreement whereby a floating (or market or spot) price based on an underlying commodity is traded for a fixed price over a specified period. The vast majority of commodity swaps involve oil. Many airline and rail companies enter oil commodity swap deals in order to secure lower oil costs in the long term. A commodity swap is similar to a fixed-floating interest rate swap. The difference is that in an interest rate swap, the floating leg is based on standard interest rates such as LIBOR and EURIBOR. However, in a