Last week, a hedge fund made the single largest cocoa trade in more than a decade. Will it lead to supply shortages this fall?

Enjoy your coffee this morning? Good. It's likely to get more expensive.

Have you scanned the commodity charts recently? They've been looking pretty sour as concerns about eurozone demand have heightened along with the value of the U.S. dollar.

Gold's new nominal highs against the greenback made headlines this week, but nobody (well, nobody outside the ag community, anyway) devoted banner space to previously skyrocketing hog prices. This spring, livestock gained ground and rose to new highs for the decade while gold dithered in a consolidation phase.

If you were a hard asset investor last year, you'd have been better off owning equity interests in producers and processors rather than the commodities themselves. In 2009, for example, the Market Vectors RVE Hard Assets Producers ETF (NYSE Arca: HAP)—an index-based portfolio comprising more than 300 global firms' stocks in the energy, agriculture, metals and forest products sectors—racked up a 41.5 percent gain, grossly outperforming the GreenHaven Continuous Commodity Index Fund (NYSE Arca: GCC). GCC, which tracks an equal-weighted index of 17 U.S.-traded commodity futures, gained 20.1 percent in 2009.

• Gold beaten by most metals, including copper
• Why the market's bullish on gasoline
• Bullish on cotton, not on sugar

As a child, I remember being very careful to wear green on St. Patrick's Day to avoid pinches from schoolmates. Investors in greenery this year have managed to avoid some financial pain themselves.

Normally at this time of year, seasonal cotton traders would be looking forward to peeling off a monthlong position in the July delivery that's proved to be a fairly reliable winner. A purchase in the second week of February ordinarily—that is, 80 percent of the time—turns a $1,150-per-contract profit. Or rather, turned a profit.