Commodity Pools

During the past twenty years, the nature of commodity pools in Australia has changed considerably from single desk marketing authorities to individual pools run by a variety of managers.

Commodity pools allow individual producers to combine some or all of their commodity production into a pool (ie they pool together grain, or sugar) generally in order to achieve benefits of scale or diversifying their pricing alternatives.

Some key advantages in marketing through commodity pools include:

• Access to markets unattainable as an individual; 

• Access to skills of a professional commodity marketer/risk manager;

• To gain scale to allow lower cost;

• Access (via the pool) to a variety of derivative instruments not otherwise available.