Commodity broker

A commodity broker is a firm or individual who executes orders to buy or sell commodity contracts on behalf of clients and charges them a commission. A firm or individual who trades for his own account is called a trader. Commodity contracts include futures, options, and similar financial derivatives. Clients who trade commodity contracts are either hedgers using the derivatives markets to manage risk, or speculators who are willing to assume that risk from hedgers in hopes of a profit.

History

While historically commodity brokers traded grain and livestock futures contracts, today commodity brokers trade a wide variety of financial derivatives based on not only grain and livestock, but also derivatives based on foods/softs, metals, energy, stock indexes, equities, bonds, currencies, and an ever growing list of other underlying assets. Ever since the 1980s, the majority of commodity contracts traded are financial derivatives with financial underlying assets such as stock indexes and currencies.