StrikeAndYield crib sheet · information and education only

Commodities

Raw materials as an asset class — energy, metals and agriculture, traded mostly through futures.

The shelf — 10 instruments

Commodity ETC / ETP	Commodities in a brokerage account: physical metal or futures strips, wrapped as listed securities.
Precious Metals Spot	Gold and silver, bought outright — the oldest financial asset, still trading like a currency without a country.

Carbon Allowances	A commodity invented by law: the right to emit one tonne of CO2, made scarce on purpose and tradable by design.
Commodity Future	Standardised contracts on oil, gold, wheat and power — where the physical world sets its prices.
Power Purchase Agreement	A long-dated contract to buy electricity at a fixed price — the instrument that decides whether a wind farm gets built at all.

Commodity Option	Optionality on oil, gold and grain — almost always struck on the future, not the physical.
Commodity Swap	Fix the price of a flow: months or years of oil, gas or metal, settled in cash against published indices.
Electricity Futures	Futures on the one commodity that cannot be stored — where prices go negative at noon and 100× at dinnertime.
Freight Derivative	A forward on the cost of moving cargo by sea. The most violent price series in commodities, hedged with a contract on an index nobody can deliver.
Weather Derivative	A contract that settles on the temperature, not on any asset. Invented so an energy company could hedge a warm winter — the purest example of a derivative with no underlying you can own.

Inventory — The level of storage, not the flow of production
The cost and availability of storage — It sets how far into contango the curve can go
Weather and season — Predictable in shape, unpredictable in size
Politics and transport — A route matters as much as a reserve
The dollar — Priced in dollars, so the currency moves the price
The roll, for anyone holding paper — It can dominate the return entirely

Monthly	First notice and expiry
Monthly	Index roll windows
Weekly	Inventory reports
Seasonal	Injection and withdrawal seasons
Harvest and planting	For anything grown

Counted from the same table each product page prints. Not a rating and not a ranking: there is deliberately no total.