Coppied this from Moore Research, put a trend line and highlighted some dips on the chart. I'm to lazy to do the math, but if hit 2.00 on the chart and one bought and held on with the assumtion it would not hit zero what is the cost of a full size contract from 2.00 to zero. Lets say it was bought as an investment. I remember when oats seemed to have a floor of about 1.10 which on 5k busshels was $5,500, and even some years when you could pick up oj for about $14,000 per contract, or even crude oil around $13 per barrel.

True story. It was either before the first Iraq war (operation desert storm) or right before the second Iraq war. I can't remember. Not sure if I was still in my apartement or had bought my house yet. Anyhow oil was trading about $12 per barrel. I had read about just buying it as an investment and hanging on as the historic lows was about $8-$10 per barrel. So if you bought a contract at say $12 for 1000 barrels you have $12,000 invested with the idea it can't go to zero, and your max risk is the total 12k. I called my broker to buy a contract of oil and he said the word all over the "floor" was that opec would not agree to cut production (there was an opec meeting that day), and when crude dipped into single digits they would tell their customers to back up the truck on crude oil. I said greate insure to call me. The next morning I get up grab the paper and read that crude oil vaults $1.5 to $13 as Opec comes to an agreement to cut production. Called the broker and he said those MF's on the floor screwed up. I said to myself well I missed the move as it was now at $13 per barrel. How wrong was I. I never traded it again until it broke the $40 per barrel ceiling that it hit for the two Iraq wars. Hard to imagine crude use to trade less than the equivalent amount of bottle water you could buy in a corner store.

Of course if you buy a commodity with that in mind and have to keep rolling it over the carrying charges can kill you. I did it with mini wheat one time and also with oj twice, and had to weather the constant carrying charge peminums that tended to decay.