If someone works in commodity research, what kind of things do they research and from where do they research it? e.g. what kind of data are important. I know the history of commodity corporation and their ill-fated attempts to garner fundamental data (e.g. going to export countries to observe, first-hand, harvest forecasts). I believe they instead started to use more "technical analysis" in their commodity trading.so I was wondering how its done at big banks today, many years later. Perhaps considering the changes in technology and communications.

some factors:Supply fundamentalsdemand fundamentalsseasonal effectslike interest rates, you consider each commodity to be a term structure correlations with other marketsstorage reports"positions of traders" reports I.e. Who are the maekt participants and what are their net positionsany changes to reserves states reserves or extraction technologiesvarying transportation costsChanging patterns of trade and technologypotential for substitution with an alternative commodity

In conclusion I guess it depends on your timescale. Trade for a few minutes / hours / possibly days, and you can just observe the market itself. But any longer, and you need to understand the fundamentals. For example, in US crude oil (WTI), the biggest news each week is 10:30 on Wednesdays (very exactly), when we get the US storage report listing the different oil products and how much of each product is stored in the US. The change from the previous week is the best read for the supply-demand condition. The data released is listed here:http://ir.eia.gov/wpsr/wpsr.txtwith historical stats here:http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_s ... s_w.htmYou have to know which number to read (mainly, the line called (9)), and preferably you have a few year's history because inventory has a seasonal pattern so a 'rise' in inventroy might be considered a 'fall' if a much larger rise was expected based on the time of year.If you don't know about this kind of thing, and you have an open position at 10:29:55 on Wednesday, the spot price of oil can move $2 in 10 seconds, more than the rest of the day put together, and your arb-trade is totally knocked out!