Commodity Trader

A commodity trader is a person or business that engages in the trading of physical commodities like gold, copper, silver, oil, pork bellies, and even frozen concentrated orange juice. These commodities are commonly used at the beginning of a production value chain and end up as consumer products, construction, or animal feed.

Commodity trader jobs were glorified and spoofed in the 1982 film Trading Places. In this film, Eddie Murphy’s character (a homeless criminal) proved that anyone with a pulse could do this job after seven minutes of training. How the character of Billy Valentine was able to trade for the Duke Brothers without FINRA and education requirements remains a great mystery, as the job also requires (through the Commodity Exchange Act) passage of the National Commodity Futures (Series 3) examination and registration with the National Futures Association (NFA).

Commodity traders really like talking about geopolitical events, even in the company of people who are more interested in talking about pop culture. They will ask people randomly “Where do you think that the price of oil is heading?” just so that they can answer that question moments later by repeating something that they read in S&P Global Platts or Bloomberg earlier that day.

Commodity traders have largely been replaced by computers at the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the number of commodity funds has declined in recent years. These trends have fueled an incredible uptick in the number of recently hired bartenders all across the Windy City. They also have been known to get really excited about Bitcoin when other commodity prices decline or remain stagnant for extended periods of time.