FINANCIALS OVERVIEW

US-Dollar | CRB index | Stock Index | Foreign Exchange

CRB Index Contracts | Quote-board

The CRB Futures Index has been recognized as the main barometer of commodity prices for many years. Globally, the CRB Futures Index is the accepted standard for measuring the commodity futures price level. It is the most widely followed commodity index by the financial press around the world, and is found somewhere on almost every trader’s quote terminal. This fact alone can cause changes in the price level of the Index to create an immediate impact on other markets such as stocks, bonds, and currencies.

To alleviate the need to choose individual commodities while facilitating the investment in a representative group, the New York Futures Exchange, Inc., began offering, in 1986, futures contracts on the CRB Futures Index.

17 Commodity Components
The CRB Futures Index is widely viewed as a broad measure of overall commodity price trends because of the diverse nature of the 17 commodities of which it is comprised. As a broad measure of commodity price trends it serves as an excellent price measure for macro-economic analysis. This reflects the fact that a more diverse price index contains more information and, thus, can be used to better analyze economy-wide market forces.

Equal Weighting
Equal weighting is used for both arithmetic averaging of individual commodity months and for geometric averaging of these 17 commodity averages. From a pricing point of view, equal weighting is attractive because no single month or commodity has undue impact on the Index. This makes it harder to manipulate the Index and means that the Index is less subject to the discontinuities associated with temporary supply and demand imbalances in any one month or commodity

GROUP	COMPONENTS
Energy: Grains: Industrials: Livestock: Precious Metals: Softs:	Crude Oil (CL), Heating Oil (HO), Natural Gas (NG) (17.6%) Corn (C), Soybeans (S), Wheat (W) (17.6%) Copper (HG), Cotton (CT) (11.8%) Live Cattle (LC), Lean Hogs (LH) (11.8%) Gold (GC), Platinum (PL), Silver (SI) (17.6%) Cocoa (CC), Coffee (KC), Orange Juice (JO), Sugar (SB) (23.5%)

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