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Chartists can follow commodities using ETFs/ETNs, spot prices or special indices. Spot prices, which represent the “real McCoy”, are clearly the purest way to follow a commodity. ETFs and ETNs can be good trading vehicles, but some have serious drawbacks, especially over the long-term. ETFs and ETNs backed by the physical commodity, such as the Gold SPDR (GLD), track the price of gold quite well. ETFs and ETNs composed of futures contracts, such as the US Natural Gas Fund (UNG), do not track the underlying commodity so well. It is, therefore, advisable to check on the underlying commodity and the composition of the ETF/ETN when investing in these securities. There are also many commodity-related indices from Dow Jones-UBS. These track the underlying commodity or commodity group quite well and there are even some iPath ETNs based on these indices.
Click this image to see the symbol catalog.
It all starts with the symbol catalog, which is accessible from a link at the top of each web page. Click the link and then enter a specific search term. StockCharts.com users can find symbols for the three commodity groups using the terms below (without quotation marks):
The term “spot price” will return 20 different spot price symbols.
The term “ipath dow” will return a list of the iPath commodity ETNs.
The term “$DJA” will return all of the Dow Jones-UBS commodity-related indices
Click this image to see the symbol catalog.
