This is a broad overview of commodities markets that seems to target either finance professionals who need to understand commodities markets or commodity professionals who want to benefit from financial insights. The author is a finance professor who has considerable experience consulting to energy companies and some exposure to other commodities. This means she has in-depth knowledge about aspects of her topic but is weak on others.

Opening chapters discuss spot, forward and futures transactions. This material is poorly written. Readers who are new to the concepts will be confused. Those who are already familiar with them will learn little that is new. This unfortunate pattern continues into subsequent chapters where the author takes up an elementary discussion of financial engineering.

The second half of the book is much better. Here the author provides qualitative descriptions of a variety of markets—agriculturals, metals, energies, emissions, etc. The best and most in-depth of these relate to energies, but all are quite nice.

The book closes with a chapter discussing commodities as a new "asset class," whatever that means.