Softs
16 topics
Coffee
Arabica trades on the New York exchange in 37,500 pound contracts with certified warehouse stocks behind delivery, while robusta t...
Cocoa
Ivory Coast and Ghana grow about 60 percent, on smallholder farms with aging trees, disease, and underinvestment, with state marke...
Sugar
Raw sugar trades 112,000 pound contracts in New York, white sugar in London, and Brazil, the top producer and exporter by far, set...
Cotton
New York trades 50,000 pound contracts deliverable against certified warehouse receipts. China and India lead production, the US i...
Orange Juice
ICE frozen concentrated orange juice trades 15,000 pound contracts in New York, the market made famous by the movie Trading Places...
Rubber
Natural rubber comes from tapping hevea trees, Thailand the top producer, with Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia following, smallho...
Palm Oil
Some 75 million tonnes yearly, over a third of all vegetable oil, come from Indonesia, the dominant producer and exporter, and Mal...
Lumber
CME random length futures trade 110,000 board feet, cash settled against a framing lumber index, and the contract went from obscur...
Potash
Muriate of potash, the standard 60 percent K2O product, ships in tonnes from Saskatchewan, which holds giant evaporite deposits an...
Phosphate Rock
Morocco holds the majority of world reserves and exports rock and processed fertilizer, China is the top producer, and the US, fro...
Wood Pulp
Chemical pulping dissolves lignin, and bleached kraft pulp in hardwood and softwood grades makes printing paper, packaging, and ti...
Tea
Types split black, green, oolong, and white from one plant, with grades and leaf styles running from whole leaf to the fannings an...
Tobacco
China grows the most, Brazil, India, and Zimbabwe follow, with Zimbabwe tobacco a top foreign exchange earner and Brazil the top e...
Vanilla
Vanilla comes from the cured pods of an orchid that must be hand pollinated flower by flower outside its native Mexico, and Madaga...
Black Pepper
Black pepper is the dried unripe fruit of a tropical vine, and white pepper is the same fruit with its outer skin removed. Vietnam...
Jute
Jute is a long, soft bast fiber grown mainly in the Ganges delta, with India and Bangladesh producing nearly all of the world crop...