Coral explained it well. They are just like a stock that tracks the price of Corn or any other commodity. Nothing more. So one isn't leveraged or margined to extreme. No price changing contracts with backwardation or contango. No expiration days or roll overs. Just a plain old stock that tracks the commodity as I posted with the ETF:CORN and overlaid with Sept Corn. So one can even take a more conservative postion within a stock or retirement self directed trading account. I read an article about commodity traders and the single most dominant and overwhelming factor in causing major losses was the use of leverage. ETFs do remove a lot of negative factors in trading a commodity or anything else they track. More and more are coming out all the time to cover just about everything. A person can now buy a basket of Grains with an ETF:JJG like this one. Including Agricultural ETFs that cover the Fertilizer stocks and Farm Equipment stocks. They historically have a strong run up from summer into the end of the year. Much like Gold. There are several GOLD ETFs and GOLD Equity ETFs as well. as Silver ETFs or a Silver Stock ETF that covers a basket of Silver stocks like many of the other ETFs in a specific sector. Just about everything overall. Even Solar ETFs ,Crude and the rest of them.