Roger Nusbaum submits: A company called ETF Securities, who among other things is the issuer of the Brent Oil Security [OILB.L] traded in London, has filed for 29 new commodity based ETFs -- 29 of them. They will trade in London but should be available through brokerage firms in the US that offer access to foreign traded securities.
There are two types of ETFs in this batch, one will be individual commodities and the other will be commodity baskets.
Single Commodities
* Aluminum
* Coffee
* Copper
* Corn
* Cotton
* Crude
* Gasoline
* Gold
* Heating oil
* Lean Hogs
* Live cattle
* Nat Gas
* Nickel
* Silver
* Soybean Oil
* Soybeans
* Sugar
* Wheat
* Zinc
Commodity Baskets
* All Commodities
* Agriculture
* Energy
* Ex-energy
* Grains
* Industrial metals
* Livestock
* Petroleum
* Precious Metals
* Softs (I assume this means soft commodities)
Zowie.
This is a double edged sword. In general I am all for having the choice of being able to access narrow themes like these but there will be people that use them incorrectly and hurt themselves because of it. It is not clear to me that too many do-it-yourselfers need to separate nickel from zinc.
The industrial metal ETF will be a great tool for capturing the early stages of future economic recoveries and expansions. Some aspect of industrial metals are present in some of the current commodity products already out there but isolating this one part offers some appeal.
Another basket that makes a good first impression (conceptually anyway) is the Soft Commodity basket which I assume will be sugar, soybeans, coffee, maybe rice and a couple of others-of course this might be the Agriculture basket instead (not much detail yet) but either way access to food stuffs seems like another positive.
The advantage to these, vs the existing broad based products that already exist, is that you can control how much of your commodity exposure goes to what type of asset.
The single commodity ETFs have merit too but these are more dangerous, fair warning.
