How to Make Money in Agricultural Commodities

The above are weekly graphs of Corn, Wheat and Soybeans,as you can see since the last quarter of 2006 these have been making new highs and in fact corn has hit over $4 a bushel, this is the first time since 1996 that this has happened.

Jim Rogers one of the most succesful commodity bulls of the last 30 years has been quoted on many occasions stating that the so called "Soft" Commodites are where he sees the big growth in the next 5-10 years.Everyone is familiar with the energy and precious metal stories , but agricultural commodities are not really something that many people outside of the CBOT(Chicago Board of Trade) have much to do with.This plays in to our hands, the big money is to be made buying in to these areas before we start hearing about it on CNBC and the Wall Street Journal.Jim was telling anyone who would listen about Oil and Gold around two or three years before they really took off and became big news.We want to be in these for the next few yeasr then be selling to the masses when everyone is talking about them.

One of the major challenges surrounding these assets was unless you were willing or able to trade Commodity Futures there was little or no opportunity to play these markets directly.I personally do trade Commodity Futures ..and they are not for the faint hearted,but they were the only direct way to play these markets up till now.

On Friday the 12th of January for the first time ever investors could buy Agricultural Products through the stock market...Powershares launched an agricultural ETF (NYSE: DBA).

This new fund tracks an index which is divided equally among wheat , corn, sugar and soybeans it is run by Deutsche Bank. There are many reasons why these commodities will I believe go much higher the main ones are :

1. Agriculture has been in a bear market for many years....it is now showing signs of breaking out.


2. A lot of the rationale for this can be placed at the door of higher energy costs, these commodities are used in the manufacture of alternative sources of fuel such as Ethanol-(it is rumoured that Ethanol will be given a big push by President Bush in the State of The Union address tomorrow night.)


3. China is importing more and more of these products and they are soaking up the supplies faster than ever before.


4. Lastly the USDA revised downwards its estimates on these commodities so there is likely to be less around than previously envisaged.

I like the agricultural commodity story and will be taking a position in the Powershares Agriculture Fund (NYSE:DBA) .I would be looking to hold this for a good few years and will look for opportunities to add to it on pullbacks.

My recommendation would be to scale in to it so if you are looking to own say 500 shares then buy 300 now and look for opportunites to add another 100 and then another 100 when we get some price weakness.

I will place a 25% trailing stop loss against my position.

The website for the DBA is http://www.dbfunds.db.com/dba/index.aspx

Best Wishes and Good Trading

RT

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