Tactical Strategy For Commodity Trading

A popular commodity options trading strategy is known as scale trading. It is often referred to as a “can’t lose” strategy, but the reality is that it is only as good as the trader using it.

Scale trading is based on the simple principle of buying when prices are low and selling when the prices are high. Finding entry points in the commodities market is not as straightforward as the other financial markets. For a trader to determine when a commodity is low enough to purchase can be difficult, but it is not impossible. Thankfully, there are several guidelines which can assist investors find levels at which the commodity price is a good buy.

First of all, you need to gather as much information as possible by looking at the historical charts of a range of commodities and locate the commodities where the price is historically at its lowest, or at least within the lowest 25% of the historical price range. It is advisable to look back at least 10 years of history. You should also be aware that scale trading has a better success with commodities which are physical such as crude oil and wheat and as such, is not an ideal tactical strategy to use with financial services commodities.

The strategy behind scale trading is to only initiate buy trades and not to initiate sell trades. The reason that this is done is that a physical commodity always holds a positive quantity of value so when the price becomes cheap, the commodity producers will ultimately produce less with prices stabilising in due course. After you identify a commodity that fits the strategy’s requirements the next thing to do is to set up levels where futures contracts can be bought and sold on that commodity.

Using the commodity corn as an example, this is how scale trading works: Assume corn is currently trading at $2 per bushel, with historical prices ranging from $1.80 to $5.50. You can set up several levels when you can start buying – $1.90, $1.80, $1.70, $1.60, and so on. When the first buy order is filled, you can set a sell order at $2. When looked at this way, 5,000 bushels can lead to as much as $500 profit.

If the market goes down to $1.80, then you can create another sell order at $1.90. The previous contract will still be held by you which you would sell once the market moves up and reaches the $2 mark. This means that losses using this trading strategy are kept to a minimum since selling prices are predefined. Hence, the idea behind this tactical strategy is that you level into the market at low prices and sell at prices which have been defined into the strategy until you have closed all your contracts.

It is not really possible to use this strategy in the short term. Contracts using scale trades typically take weeks and sometimes years to close since it is the price that creates the selling signal so you must commit to the strategy and follow the rules meticulously. You can of course trade commodities through a binary options broker such as Banc De Binary which allows you to profit by correctly predicting the price direction of your chosen commodity, applying this strategy where appropriate.