Gold futures' margin
The initial margin is $5940 and maintenance margin $5400.  A simple search of Comex Gold Margin gives the CME group site. You then need to specify CMX metals to see the margins.  Gold is currently about $1300. A gold future is 100 oz. So the full contract is worth $130K. You want to 'go long' so you enter into a contract for Dec '14. You put up $5940, and if gold rises, you gain $100 for each $1 it goes up. Likewise on the downside. If gold drops $5.40, you lost $540 and will get a call to end the position or to put up more money. It's similar to stock margin requirements, only the numbers are much lower, your leverage with futures is over 20 to 1. The initial and overnight margin requirements are set by the exchanges (who calculate them using the Standard Portfolio of Analysis of Risk, or 'SPAN' system), and positions are market to market according to these at the end of the trading session. To find these margin requirements you will need to consult the website of the exchange on which the contract you are trading is issued (i.e. if you're trading on the London Metal Exchange it's no good looking at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's margin requirements as a previous answer suggests!). However, for positions entered and exited within the same day, the daytrade margin rate will apply. This is set by your broker rather than the exchange, and can be as little as 10% of the exchange requirement. You can find a useful comparison of different margin types and requirements in the article I have published here: Understanding Margin for Futures Trading.
"As mentioned in other answers, you find out by reading the Rulebook for that commodity and exchange.  I'll quote a couple of random passages to show how they vary: For CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) Random Length Lumber Futures, the delivery is ornate: Seller shall give his Notice of Intent to Deliver to the Clearing   House prior to 12:00 noon (on any Business Day after termination of   trading in the contract month. 20103.D. Seller's Duties If the buyer's designated destination is east of the western boundaries of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska,   Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, and the western boundary of Manitoba,   Canada, the seller shall follow the buyer's shipping instructions   within seven (7) Business Days after receipt of such instructions. In   addition, the seller shall prepay the actual freight charges and bill   the buyer, through the Clearing House, the lowest published freight   rate for 73-foot railcars from Prince George, British Columbia to the   buyer's destination. If the lowest published freight rate from Prince   George, British Columbia to buyer's destination is a rate per one   hundred pounds, the seller shall bill the buyer on the weight basis of   1,650 pounds per thousand board feet. The term ""lowest published   freight rate"" refers only to the lowest published ""general through   rate"" and not to rates published in any other rate class. If, however, the buyer’s destination is outside of the aforementioned   area, the seller shall follow the same procedures except that the   seller shall have the right to change the point of origin and/or   originating carrier within 2 Business Days after receipt of buyer’s   original shipping instructions. If a change of origin and/or   originating carrier is made, the seller shall then follow the buyer's   revised instructions within seven (7) Business Days after receipt of   such instructions. If the freight rate to the buyer's destination is not published, the   freight charge shall be negotiated between the buyer and seller in   accordance with industry practice. Any additional freight charges resulting from diversion by the buyer   in excess of the actual charges for shipment to the destination   specified in the shipping instructions submitted to the Clearing House   are the responsibility of the buyer. Any reduction in freight charges   that may result from a diversion is not subject to billing adjustment   through the Clearing House. Any applicable surcharges noted by the   rail carrier shall be considered as part of the freight rate and can   be billed to the buyer through the CME Clearing House. If within two (2) Business Days of the receipt of the Notice of Intent   the buyer has not designated a destination, or if during that time the   buyer and seller fail to agree on a negotiated freight charge, the   seller shall treat the destination as Chicago, Illinois. If the buyer   does not designate a carrier or routing, the seller shall select same   according to normal trade practices. To complete delivery, the seller   must deposit with the Clearing House a Delivery Notice, a uniform   straight bill of lading (or a copy thereof) and written information   specifying grade, a tally of pieces of each length, board feet by   sizes and total board feet. The foregoing documents must be received   by the Clearing House postmarked within fourteen (14) Business Days of   the date of receipt of shipping instructions. In addition, within one (1) Business Day after acceptance by the   railroad, the Clearing House must receive information (via a telephone   call, facsimile or electronic transmission) from the seller giving the   car number, piece count by length, unit size, total board footage and   date of acceptance. The ￼date of acceptance by the railroad is the   date of the bill of lading, signed and/or stamped by the originating   carrier, except when determined otherwise by the Clearing House. For some commodities you can't get physical delivery (for instance, Cheese futures won't deliver piles of cheese to your door, for reasons that may be obvious) 6003.A. Final Settlement There shall be no delivery of cheese in settlement of this contract.   All contracts open as of the termination of trading shall be cash   settled based upon the USDA monthly weighted average price in the U.S.   for cheese. The reported USDA monthly weighted average price for   cheese uses both 40 pound cheddar block and 500 pound barrel prices. CME gold futures will deliver to a licensed depository, so you would have to arrange for delivery from the depository (they'll issue you a warrant), assuming you really want a 100 troy oz. bar of gold: CONTRACT SPECIFICATIONS The contract for delivery on futures contracts shall be one hundred   (100) troy ounces of gold with a weight tolerance of 5% either higher   or lower. Gold delivered under this contract shall assay to a minimum   of 995 fineness and must be a brand approved by the Exchange. Gold meeting all of the following specifications shall be deliverable   in satisfaction of futures contract delivery obligations under this   rule: Either one (1) 100 troy ounce bar, or three (3) one (1) kilo bars. Gold must consist of one or more of the Exchange’s Brand marks, as provided in Chapter 7, current at the date of the delivery of   contract. Each bar of Eligible gold must have the weight, fineness, bar number, and brand mark clearly incised on the bar. The weight may be   in troy ounces or grams. If the weight is in grams, it must be   converted to troy ounces for documentation purposes by dividing the   weight in grams by 31.1035 and rounding to the nearest one hundredth   of a troy ounce. All documentation must illustrate the weight in troy   ounces. Each Warrant issued by a Depository shall reference the serial number and name of the Producer of each bar. Each assay certificate issued by an Assayer shall certify that each bar of gold in the lot assays no less than 995 fineness and weight of   each bar and the name of the Producer that produced each bar. Gold must be delivered to a Depository by a Carrier as follows: a. directly from a Producer; b. directly from an Assayer, provided that such gold is accompanied by   an assay certificate of such Assayer; or c. directly from another Depository; provided, that such gold was   placed in such other Depository pursuant to paragraphs (a) or (b)   above." I assume you've looked into gold as an asset class (which is considered to be a good diversifier in your portfolio at about 5% of investments) because there are a lot of opinions around about that.  But in terms of physical vs paper gold investment, my experience has been that they'll absolutely kill you on fees if you're not careful. I had a broker try and charge me $80/oz. They do it in the margins though, so they'll just sell at say $1,350 but buy at $1,200. Just make sure you either know the market price when you walk in and stick to your guns or lock in a price ahead of time. "As others have alluded to but haven't said due to the lack of reputation points to spare, you can take advantage of oil prices by leveraging up and using as much credit and margin as the banks and brokerages (respectively) will lend you. People assume that the correct answer on this forum has to masquerade as conservative financial advice, and this is not advice nor conservative. Futures contracts are readily available, but they are expensive to obtain (like a minimum entry of $4,450). But if this expense is no such object to you then you can then obtain this contract which is actually worth 20x that and experience the price appreciation and depreciation of the whole contract. The concept is similar to a downpayment on a mortgage. You assume ""rock bottom"" oil prices, but fortunately for you, futures contracts will allow you to quickly change your bets from future price appreciation and allow you to speculate on future price depreciation. So although the union workers will be protesting full time after the drilling company lays them off, you will still be getting wealthier. Long Options. These are the best. The difference with options, amongst other speculation products, is that options require the least amount of capital risk for the greatest reward. With futures, or with trading shares of an ETF (especially on margin), you have to put up a lot of capital, and if the market does not go your desired direction, then will lose a lot. And on margin products you can lose more than you put in. Being long options does not come with these dilemmas. A long march 2015 call option on USO ETF can currently be bought for less than $200 of actual cash (ie. the trading quote will be less than $2.00, but this will cost you less than $200), and will be worth $1000 on a very modest rebound in prices. The most you can lose is the $200 for the contract. Compared to $4450 on the futures, or $100,000 (that you don't have) in the futures market if oil really moves against you, or compared to whatever large amount of cash needed to actually buy shares of an ETF needed to make any decent return. These are the most lucrative (and fun and exhilarating and ) ways to take advantage of rock bottom oil prices, as an individual." I don't see any trading activity on rough rice options, so I'll just default to gold.  The initial margin on a gold futures contract is $5,940. An option on a gold futures represents 1 contract. The price of an October gold futures call with a strike of $1310 is currently $22.70. Gold spot is currently $1308.20. The October gold futures price is $1307.40. So, yeah, you can buy 1 option to later control 1 futures for $22.70, but the moment you exercise you must have $5,940 in a margin account to actually use the futures contract. You could also sell the option. I don't know how much you're going to enjoy trading options on futures though -- the price of this option just last week ranged from $13.90 to $26, and last month it ranged from $15.40 to $46.90. There's some crazy leverage involved. It is a question of how volatile the stock is perceived to be, its beta correlation to the S&P500 or other index. Margin requirements are derived from the Federal Reserve, Self Regulatory Organizations, the exchange itself, the broker you use, and which margining system you are using. So that makes this a loaded question. There are at least three margin systems, before you have your own risk officer in a glass room that doesn't care how leveraged up you get. Brokers primarily don't want to lose money. "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://themarketmogul.com/central-bank-policy/?hvid=uJZ0z) reduced by 94%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; A futures contract would be set at a certain level of NGDP growth, and from the buy and sell orders made on the contract, the central bank would ascertain the market&amp;#039;s prediction of future nominal income and alter its policy rate in a way that would bring those expectations in line with its original target.  &gt; TLTRO. First launched by the ECB in 2014, with TLTRO-II introduced in 2016, the TLTRO program allows banks to borrow reserve balances from the central bank, long-term and with negative rates, of up to 30% of the value of their outstanding loans to businesses and consumers, directly incentivising new loan creation to spur growth.  &gt; The policy has the potential to be far more effective than the aforementioned policy innovations and is likely to be relied upon in an expanded form, which might be referred to as &amp;#039;helicopter money&amp;#039;, alongside negative policy rates, when the next recession occurs.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6v2n2b/a_new_dawn_in_central_bank_policy/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~195528 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **rate**^#1 **inflation**^#2 **policy**^#3 **Bank**^#4 **central**^#5" My interpretation of that sentence is that you can't do the buying/selling of shares outright (sans margin) because of the massive quantity of shares he's talking about.  So you have to use margin to buy the stocks. However, because in order to make significant money with this sort of strategy you probably need to be working dozens of stocks at the same time, you need to be familiar with portfolio margin.  Since your broker does not calculate margin calls based on individual stocks, but rather on the value of your whole portfolio, you should have experience handling margin not just on individual stock movements but also on overall portfolio movements. For example, if 10% (by value) of the stocks you're targeting tend to have a correlation of -0.8 with the price of oil you should probably target another 10% (by value) in stocks that tend to have a correlation of +0.8 with the price of oil.  And so on and so forth.  That way your portfolio can weather big (or even small) changes in market conditions that would cause a margin call on a novice investor's portfolio. "I was able to find a fairly decent index that trades very close to 1/10th the actual price of gold by the ounce. The difference may be accounted to the indexes operating cost, as it is very low, about 0.1%. The index is the ETFS Gold Trust index (SGOL). By using the SGOL index, along with a Standard Brokerage investment account, I was able to set up an investment that appropriately tracked my gold ""shares"" as 10x their weight in ounces, the share cost as 1/10th the value of a gold ounce at the time of purchase, and the original cost at time of purchase as the cost basis. There tends to be a 0.1% loss every time I enter a transaction, I'm assuming due to the index value difference against the actual spot value of the price of gold for any day, probably due to their operating costs.  This solution should work pretty well, as this particular index closely follows the gold price, and should reflect an investment in gold over a long term very well. It is not 100% accurate, but it is accurate enough that you don't lose 2-3% every time you enter a new transaction, which would skew long-term results with regular purchases by a fair amount."