কমোডিটি: সোনা, তেল, খাদ্যশস্য Commodities

Gold, oil, wheat, rice, cotton. These are commodities, and one of their properties is completely unlike a share: they produce no income. An ounce of gold is still an ounce of gold a year later. It pays no dividend, runs no factory and employs nobody.

Almost everything useful about commodities follows from that one fact. This lesson works through it, and looks at what role they can sensibly play for an ordinary person in Bangladesh.

What an income-free asset means

A share price rises over the long run because the company earns something every year and puts part of it back into the business. That is the engine of compounding.

Gold has no such engine. The gold price rises only if somebody in the future is willing to pay more than today. This is not a criticism, only a distinction: gold is a store of value, not a productive asset.

What the gold price moves with

Three things, and all three are decided outside Bangladesh.

Fear. War, banking trouble, political instability: demand for gold rises, because gold is nobody's liability. A bank can fail and a government can default; gold rests on no one's promise.

Interest rates. Gold pays no interest, so when rates rise the opportunity cost of holding it rises. That is why gold is often weak while rates are climbing.

The dollar. Gold is quoted internationally in dollars, so a strong dollar makes gold more expensive in other currencies. Here that has a direct consequence: when the taka weakens, the local gold price rises even if the international price has not.

Oil is everybody's problem

The oil price affects the share market far more than gold does, for a simple reason: oil is inside the cost base of nearly every business. Transport, power, fertiliser, plastics, and even food prices move with it.

For Bangladesh oil is an import, so a higher price means more dollars needed, a wider trade deficit and pressure on the taka. The lesson on interest rates and the taka traces that chain. In the share market the result is thinner margins at transport, cement and plastics-dependent companies.

Ways to get exposure from here

There is no organised commodity exchange here where an ordinary person can buy a gold or oil contract. So in practice exposure arrives in three ways, and all three need care.

Jewellery. The most common, and the weakest as an investment. Making charges, wastage and the shop's margin take a large slice at purchase, and none of it comes back on sale. Jewellery is something you wear and something cultural, and that is fine, but counting it as an investment makes the arithmetic wrong.

Gold bars or coins. The making charge is much smaller, so they are more honest as an investment. The questions become storage, proof of purity, and finding a buyer when you sell.

Indirectly, through companies. You cannot buy oil directly, but you can buy shares in companies that a rising oil price helps or hurts. That counts as investing, because there is a business earning something underneath.

How much in a portfolio

A reasonable position for an ordinary investor is small and purposeful. If gold is there at all, let it be there as insurance rather than as an engine of growth, and as a small share of total assets. Anything that earns nothing lowers the growth rate of the whole plan as its share rises.