Goldman Sachs Commodity Index - GSCI

A way to track overall commodity prices. (Think: the canary in a mine shaft of inflation.) You can follow the prices of individual commodities (like oil, hogs, corn, gold, or zinc) on futures exchanges. However, getting a feel for the movement of the general price of all commodities is difficult.

To that end, the good people at Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs have combined the prices of 24 major commodities into a single index. The GSCI uses futures contracts to gather price data, and weights the index based on average quantity of production for each component commodity. So the more we make of something, the more it influences movement in the index. As such, the index is heavily weighted toward energy.