How retail investors get exposure

You rarely need a futures account to invest in commodities. There are three main routes, each with trade-offs.

1. Futures (and options on futures)

The most direct route — you trade the actual contract on CME, ICE or B3.

Pros: pure exposure, deep liquidity, no management fee.
Cons: requires a futures-enabled broker and margin, the leverage is dangerous, and you must manage expiry and rolling yourself. Best suited to experienced, active traders and to producers genuinely hedging.

2. ETFs and ETNs

Exchange-traded funds give commodity exposure through a normal brokerage account, like buying a stock.

Physically-backed funds actually hold the metal — gold ETFs storing bullion are the cleanest example, tracking the price closely.
Futures-based funds hold and roll futures contracts. These suffer the contango drag from the rolling lesson, so over long periods they can lag the spot price meaningfully. Read what the fund actually holds.
Pros: simple, no margin, no expiry management. Cons: management fees, and roll drag for futures-based funds.

3. Equities of producers

Buying the shares of companies that produce a commodity gives indirect, often leveraged exposure to its price.

Petrobras (PETR4) for oil, Vale (VALE3) for iron ore, JBS or Marfrig for beef, SLC Agrícola for grains, Suzano for pulp — Brazilian names that move with their underlying commodity.
Pros: pays dividends, trades in normal accounts, can outperform the raw commodity when the company is well-run. Cons: you also take on company-specific risk — management, debt, costs, governance — so the share can fall even when the commodity rises.

Choosing a route

For most everyday investors, a physically-backed ETF (for gold) or producer equities (for everything else) is the sensible starting point — they avoid the leverage and expiry traps of raw futures while still capturing the commodity story. Match the vehicle to your knowledge, your account and your tolerance for the roll and leverage mechanics covered in this chapter.