Novice In Commodities

What do you want to know? Commodities as an asset class can be very fun to invest in. Their main advantage over equities, and this is true for international commodities, is that they are hard to manipulate.
For example it is very difficult to manipulate the preices of gold, silver and crude because of the quantities. It not like a single stock that is subject to manipulation if one so desires.
Secondly and most importantly commodities deal with actual product. Hence the spot or physical market is very important. Without a good spot market the idea of a futures market is meaningless. Price discovery is done at all levels.......
Thirdly, commodities markets are very highly leveraged. For instance by paying a 5% initial margin one can buy a contract of gold worth 7 to 8 lakhs. This is true for almost all commodities. This makes it both very profitable and risky at the same time because a one tic move could amount to one hundred/thousand units of money. So if gold goes from $500 to $500.01, you couls loose/make a lot more than one cent on the trade.
There is a lot more but these are the basics. Also to consider is the fact that most commodities can be storted (exception being power/electricity) so there is an associated cost of carry, transportation etc.....
Feel free to ask more questions and I hope this helps.....