Commodity market Commodity market A commodity market is a market that trades in primary economic sector rather than manufactured products. Soft commodities are agricultural products such as wheat, coffee, cocoa, fruit and sugar. Hard commodities are mined, such as gold and oil. Investors access about 50 major commodity markets worldwide with purely financial transactions increasingly outnumbering physical trades in which goods are delivered. Futures contracts are the oldest way of investing in commodities. Futures are secured by physical assets. Commodity markets can include physical trading and derivatives trading using spot prices, forwards, futures, and options on futures. Farmers have used a simple
Commodity (Marxism) of value, product-values in an open market are regulated by the average socially necessary labour time required to produce them, and price relativities of products are ultimately governed by the law of value. Commodity-trade, Marx argues, historically begins at the boundaries of separate economic communities based otherwise on a "non-commercial" form of production. Thus, producers trade in those goods of which those producers, have episodic or permanent surpluses to their own requirements, and they aim to obtain different goods with an equal value in return. Marx refers to this as "simple exchange" which implies what Frederick Engels calls "simple commodity