Education for Beginners

Some people have asked me where do you even start trying to learn about commodities and trading futures? You can't exactly just turn on CNBC and catch up on the latest trends in soybeans or open up your local paper and find out that the African cocoa crop has been wiped out (and for the record it has not been so don't go trampling anyone just yet). But then again, I suppose we should start out by trying to figure out why either of those issues even matter! For this I will refer you to a few good places to go for education.

The very first one that I would recommend is the book Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably In The World's Best Market written by Jim Rogers. I know I have already cited him once in the short lifespan of this blog, but he is truly a good person to learn from. The link there is to the Amazon webpage that has a description of the book and how you can buy it. I was lucky, my local library had it and I just checked it out there. Here Jim takes you through the very basics of fundamental commodities investing, demystifies horror stories you hear about "guys that lost everything" in the commodities markets, and then takes you on up through some basic plays and strategies to keep an eye on for the coming years.

If you are more web prone, you can get some good starter information from the Hard Assets Investor website Hard Assets University. This is a completely free program that goes through "classes" like 101, 201, 301 etc. It starts with a very basic entry and moves on up through advanced concepts for active traders. I like this site because it borrows from the knowledge of a large group of authors and is not biased by one individual.

Overall, I would encourage anyone to look beyond these two sources and NEVER utilize only one person's methodology. You truly need to go out there, educate yourself, and develop a trading plan that works for you. If anyone has any other great ideas, leave some comments and we can discuss anything anyone has come across.