What does it mean to invest in potatoes?
"In order for a commodity to be offered as a future, the exact specifications must be specified by the exchange. This includes not only the particular grade, strain, etc (depending on what we are talking about) but also the exact delivery location (otherwise transportation costs is an issue as you noticed).  Once there is a standardized contract, the exchange can match up buyers and sellers who are agreeing to the terms of the contract.   From a fun little article on commodities: ... you will have to go either to Europe to trade European Processing   Potato futures on Eurex [...], or to India, to the Multi Commodity Exchange of India   (MCX). [...] On the MCX, two different types of potato are deliverable, ""Agra""   potatoes with the 3797 as its ""basis variety"" of potato and   ""Tarkeshwar"" potatoes with the Kufri Jyoti as its ""basis variety."" So let's look at an example, the Agra future contract on MCX.  It specifies  (size measured from at  least one side by way of  passing through sieve)   • Acceptable size 4–8 cm   • Rejected If below 4 cm and above 8 cm exceeds 5% ... and more details regarding the financials." comments discuss investing in potato futures. Learn / ready about commodity trading or commodity futures. An investopedia article How To Invest In Commodities is a good start.  There are quite a few commodities offered for normal trade or as futures. Potatos may not be offered on quite a few exchanges. Found some here Investing in commodities is fraught with quite a bit of risk, some like you have already pointed out. Of course you can't eat all and have to sell.
Canadian Couch Potato has an article which is somewhat related. Ask the Spud: Can You Time the Markets? The argument roughly boils down to the following: That said, I didn't follow the advice. I inherited a sum of money, more than I had dealt with before, and I did not feel I was emotionally capable of immediately dumping it into my portfolio (Canadian stocks, US stocks, world stocks, Canadian bonds, all passive indexed mutual funds), and so I decided to add the money into my portfolio over the course of a year, twice a month. The money that I had not yet invested, I put into a money market account. That worked for me because I was purchasing mutual funds with no transaction costs. If you are buying ETFs, this strategy makes less sense. In hindsight, this was not financially prudent; I'd have been financially better off to buy all the mutual funds right at the beginning. But I was satisfied with the tradeoff, knowing that I did not have hindsight and I would have been emotionally hurt had the stock market crashed. There must be research that would prove, based on past performance, the statistically optimal time frame for dollar-cost averaging. However, I strongly suppose that the time frame is rather small, and so I would advise that you either invest the money immediately, or dollar-cost average your investment over the course of the year. This answer is not an ideal answer to your question because it is lacking such a citation. Look, I'm not an expert in what assets DB has in transportation companies, or to what industries DB's banks lend money. DB is a multinational corporation that probably has its fingers in hundreds of markets and industries. All I am trying to say is that DB is largely disinterested. Just because DB invests marginally in transportation and logistics does not mean that it should be trusted as a significantly invested (and informed) party, any more than I should be trusted as an interested informed party in regards to technology sector because I own shares of a mutual fund that owns shares of Apple and Alphabet. Regardless of the hearsay component, which is inherently untrustworthy, DB is not a market player such that its word should be taken as anything other than with a grain of salt. The common opinion is an oversimplification at best. The problem with buying a house using cash is that it may leave you cash-poor, forcing you to take out a home equity loan at some point... which may be at a higher rate than the mortgage would have been. On the other hand, knowing that you have no obligation to a lender is quite nice, and many folks prefer eliminating that source of stress. IF you can get a mortgage at a sufficiently low rate, using it to leverage an investment is not a bad strategy. Average historical return on the stock market is around 8%, so any mortgage rate lower than that is a relatively good bet and a rate MUCH lower (as now) is that much better a bet. There is, of course, some risk involved and the obligation to make mortgage payments, and your actual return is reduced by what you're paying on the mortage... but it's still a pretty good deal. As far as investment vehicles: The same answers apply as always. You want a rate of return higher than what you're paying on the mortgage, preferably market rate of return or better. CDs won't do it, as you've found. You're going to have to increase the risk to increase the return. That does mean picking and maintaining a diversified balance of investments and investment types. Working with index funds makes diversifying within a type easy, but you're probably going to want both stocks and bonds, rebalancing between them when they drift too far from your desired mix.  My own investments are a specific mix with one each of bond fund, large cap fund, small cap fund, REIT, and international fund. Bonds are the biggest part of that, since they're lowest risk, but the others play a greater part in producing returns on the investments. The exact mix that would be optimal for you depends on your risk tolerance (I'm classified as a moderately aggressive investor), the time horizon you're looking at before you may be forced to pull money back out of the investments, and some matters of personal taste. I've been averaging about 10%, but I had the luxury of being able to ride out the depression and indeed invest during it. Against that, my mortgage is under 4% interest rate, and is for less than 80% of the purchase price so I didn't need to pay the surcharge for mortgage insurance. In fact, I borrowed only half the cost of the house and paid the rest in cash, specifically because leveraging does involve some risk and this was the level of risk I was comfortable with. I also set the duration of the loan so it will be paid off at about the same time I expect to retire. Again, that's very much a personal judgement. If you need specific advice, it's worth finding a financial counselor and having them help you run the numbers. Do NOT go with someone associated with an investment house; they're going to be biased toward whatever produces the most income for them. Select someone who is strictly an advisor; they may cost you a bit more but they're more likely to give you useful advice. Don't take my word for any of this. I know enough to know how little I know. But hopefully I've given you some insight into what the issues are and what questions you need to ask, and answer, before making your decisions. "&gt; Thank you for the wealth of information!  Sure, I hope my opinions are food for thought.  &gt; 1) Does that basically translate to ""less tax on poor/wealthy...to promote entrepreneurship?  No, your typical entrepreneur is a smart, disgruntled employee who thinks they have a better way to do a job.  If you want more entrepreneurs, you should do things to help them succeed in a new company and minimize the risk.  Some ways to do this:  * Create a government agency that offers programs that help new companies.  Guidance and funding are obvious candidates.  Advertising for small local business would help too.  One of the most important would be getting complementing talent together because a start-up needs the talents of at least four different people to have a good chance of succeeding.  * Establish guaranteed health care.  A 40-something with a wife and kids may have a great idea but can't risk to leave his family with no health insurance for the two years it would take to get his idea off the ground.  * Better enforce anti-trust law.  I believe small companies are stifled by big companies because the latter control too much of the market.  If you want competitive markets you need to either break-up or handcuff and monitor the big players.  * Create a better safety net.  It is a lot easier to go on your own if you know at least you won't starve.  &gt; 2) Rich using money to grow their own wealth. But wouldn't that mean as a byproduct, jobs will be made?  In theory, yes, but I believe in practice the opposite happens.  Big companies can make significantly more money hoarding their market share rather than branching into new markets.  Here's a true story of my last company with names changed:  Company A makes widgets.  Company B makes bookkeeping software for tracking widgets and is very successful, controlling a majority of the market.  Company A buys Company B at an inflated price.  The government allows the sale on the condition that Company A does not use Company B's information on the widget market to gain an unfair advantage.  Company A agrees and the buyout takes place.  Company A then approaches all of Company B's customers and says, ""Let us look at the data on your bookkeeping software and we will give you a 5% discount.""  Most customers agree so Company A now has all the data controlled by Company B but this is not illegal because they got it from Company B's customers, not company B.  Company A proceeds to undercut the market because it now knows exactly how much their competitors widgets sell for.  Company A now controls a majority of the widget market and their market share continues to grow rapidly.  By the way [here is that Bloomberg article I described earlier about repatriation being about buyouts](https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-05-08/theory-of-tax-repatriation-is-better-than-the-reality).  &gt;&gt;  Take home money is used for investment. It isn't.  &gt; 3) I don't think I understand this one at all. Will you rephrase it for me?  The argument is that we need to tax corporations less so they can invest more.  Here's the problem -- investments are not taxed.  A corporation's tax is a percentage of their gross income minus their expenses.  Investment is an expense.  Therefore the more they invest, the lower their tax bill.  If you want companies to invest more, raise their tax rate.  &gt; 4) I did hear from my professor and the educational videos he had shown us that the capital tax is one of the highest among the other OECD nations.  I need to walk back what I said earlier.  The US corporate tax rate is one of the highest.  Does that mean US corporations pay the most tax?  Well, [it's complicated](http://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the-u-s-have-the-highest-corporate-tax-rate-in-the-world).  &gt; ...why can't we just close loop-holes instead of choosing to slash capital tax?  Note that those go in opposite directions.  Closing loopholes would make companies pay more.  Slashing capital tax would have them pay less.  Perhaps doing both would be revenue neutral.  I would be in support of that because I suspect loopholes benefit big companies a lot more than small ones because they have the resources to find and exploit those loopholes.  That said, people in power have been talking for 20 years about ""closing the loopholes"".  They never do.  [CGP Gray has an excellent video explaining why these loopholes are not going anywhere anytime soon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs).  &gt; 5) I think it's in each company's best interest to further their own agenda, and that agenda usually means bad for the majority.  Yes, that's a much better way of saying what I meant.  &gt; Thank you in advance for your time.  Sure, thanks for thinking, asking questions, and making up your own mind." Nobody tracks a single company's net assets on a daily basis, and stock prices are almost never derived directly from their assets (otherwise there would be no concept of 'growth stocks').  Stocks trade on the presumed current value of future positive cash flow, not on the value of their assets alone. Funds are totally different.  They own nothing but stocks and are valued on the basis on the value of those stocks.  (Commodity funds and closed funds muddy the picture somewhat, but basically a fund's only business is owning very liquid assets, not using their assets to produce wealth the way companies do.) A fund has no meaning other than the direct value of its assets.   Even companies which own and exploit large assets, like resource companies, are far more complicated than funds: e.g. gold mining or oil extracting companies derive most of their value from their physical holdings, but those holdings value depends on the moving price and assumed future price of the commodity and also on the operations (efficiency of extraction etc.) Still different from a fund which only owns very liquid assets. In the economic cycle we are are going through the crashing of the monoliths - corporate and political - mass extinction events . As far as investment is concerned where the money can be made is with the small to medium sized businesses - progressive evolution - these will pick up the business from the crashed corporates . Hedging - You have an investment and are worried that the price might drop in the near future. You don't want to sell as this will realise a capital gain for which you may have to pay capital gains tax. So instead you make an investment in another instrument (sometimes called insurance) to offset falls in your investment.  An example may be that you own shares in XYZ. You feel the price has risen sharply over the last month and is due for a steep fall. So you buy some put option over XYZ. You pay a small premium and if the price of XYZ falls you will lose money on the shares but will make money on the put option, thus limiting your losses. If the price continues to go up you will only lose the premium you paid for the option (very similar to an insurance policy). Diversification - This is when you may have say $100,000 to invest and spread your investments over a portfolio of shares, some units in a property fund and some bonds. So you are spreading your risks and returns over a range of products. The idea is if one stock or one sector goes down, you will not lose a large portion of your investment, as it is unlikely that all the different sectors will all go down at the same time. The really simple answer is that compound interest is compound not linear.  Money invested for longer earns more interest, and the sooner you start investing, the longer it has to earn interest.  These ideas come out of pension investment where 65 is the usual retirement age and what you invest in the 1st ten years of your pension (or any other compound interest fund) accounts for over 50% of what you will get out. 25 to 65 is forty years and $100 invested at 7% for 40 years is $1400.  $100 invested every year for 40 years the pot would be worth just under $20,000. At 30 years, it would be worth under $10,000, and at 20 years it would be worth only $4099.  If you double your investment amount every 10 years you would have invested $15700, and the pot would be worth $45,457. Do exactly the same but starting at 35 instead of 25 and your pot would only be worth $14,200.