There’s been some media attention in recent days about the fact that beef prices have risen to multi-year highs — articles discussing how the price of a good steak is rising dramatically, for example.
But there is additional food inflation going on currently in a wide variety of areas — and this is the kind of inflation that affects the majority of people directly, and one which the Fed seems a bit oblivious about in their reported price inflation data.  Also affects the restaurant and packaged goods industries — some more than others.
Just for example, see the following 5 charts:  (the first 4 are from zerohedge.com, the 5th is from wsj.com and is only a projection of price increases)
Beef Prices Chart
Pork Prices Chart
Shrimp Prices Chart
Egg Prices Chart
Produce Price Rise Projections
There are different factors/explanations involved in why each of these different markets are rising — drought, disease, etc.  It’s not just the above mentioned commodities, for example, the Coffee ETF (JO) is up huge this year.
JO Daily Chart
As far as ETFs that directly move with these types of food-related agricultrual commodities, investors and traders can look at UBS CMCI Food Total Return Index ETF (FUD), (but keep in mind that is lightly traded).  The more widely known PowerShares DB Agriculture ETF (DBA) is also up big in 2014 so far.  Ditto for iPath Grains ETF (JJG). Â
DBA Daily Chart
And that is not even mentioning other non-food  commodities that have rallied in 2014, such as Crude Oil (USO) and Natural Gas (UNG).  Even Gold (GLD) is higher this year.
While there’s a variety of things we could write and comment about all of this — for the active investor and option trader the most relevant point is:  there’s always a bull (and bear) market somewhere
