Frozen trees

Warm light on white snow
Shadows open to the sky
The night does not end

The price of future contracts for commodities with low storage cost is remarkably flat and close to spot price. The possibility of buying the commodity now to sell as a future means that the contract price cannot be too high, but also means that spot price cannot be too low and the predictions of the most risky positions by specialists have already influenced the spot market.

However, for goods with significant storage costs especially this only provides a maximum for future contracts price, which not always be at the contango value predicted by the difference between the short-term cost of money and benefit of lending the commodity. When the cost of carry exceeds the investment benefit of the good, the optimal time to invest will be delayed until the inflection point with the rest of the market realizing the coming rise in price, resulting in decreasing purchase volume as prices rise until the market price stabilizes and begins to fall.

But the current popular gold futures exchange requires $5000 USD on margin for a 100 troy ounce contract (~$140k, yay) to even enter, which by itself would not provide nearly enough safety to cope with artificial fluctuations whether or not working the less competitive supply side of contracts is also possible so meh ._. without $20~30k or so not going to happen