ETFs offer metals trading without the hassle of physical delivery or the

It’s not like spread-betting, where a tendency towards easy leverage can open you up to huge risk.

On the contrary, the whole idea of ETFs is to provide benchmarked exposure to real commodities prices, both on the up and the downside.

In the case of metals, where knowing and picking successful mining companies can be a very intricate, tricky and specialised business, ETFs offer an easy alternative for investors looking to gain exposure to metal price trends, without the added hassle of the execution, operational and political risk that a direct investment into a mining company can involve.

Not every commodity is available inside an ETF, but one way or another it is possible to get exposure to most of the trends in mining, metals and commodities pricing, usage and consumption via ETFs, providing investors are prepared to put up with a bit of bundling when it comes to the more obscure and less easily priced metals.

To start at the easy end, precious metals ETFs abound, in all markets around the world. The key thing to watch out for is how much assets under management an ETF has – the bigger the better, or to put it another way, the bigger, the more stable, and more accurately it will be able to reflect the price it’s supposed to be benchmarking. It’s also important to check exactly how the ETF gains its own exposure to the relevant commodity price – those that buy physical gold are generally reckoned to be more sound than those that purchase exposure to futures or other structured commodities. With that in mind, they might also reflect valuation slightly differently.

One of the biggest gold ETF is SPDR Gold Shares, followed closely by iShares Gold Trust, and the Invesco Physical Gold ETC. Plenty of companies also offer silver ETFs, and these include iShares, Wisdom Tree, the Aberdeen Standard Physical Silver ETF, and ProShares.

For other commodities, a range of options are also available. Wisdom Tree’s offerings are laid out in a particularly easy fashion here and include ETFs for platinum, copper, nickel, industrial metals, “battery solutions”, aluminium, zinc, palladium, tin, lead, as well as various commodity bundles and an assortment of bespoke gold and silver ETFs and combinations of precious metals.

What’s more, investors can choose between a range of leveraged and unleveraged options, and a significant disparity between funds under management, with one zinc fund boasting just a few hundred thousand euros under management, while at the top end the Wisdom Tree Physical Gold Fund accounts for nearly US$6.3bn.

It’s a similar story with iShares, which boasts 437 ETF offerings, of which a significant portion are for metals.

However, those looking for exposure to the more specialised metals, like cobalt or rare earths, the immediate pure play options are fairly limited. Broad exposure can be attained by buying into one of the battery metals ETFs, but whether this is more effective than buying a straight royalty company, like Anglo Pacific Group PLC (LON:APF) is open to question.

In the case of rare earths, the VanEck Vectors Rare Earth/Strategic Metals ETF, offers one way in, although the VanEck website is much harder to navigate than its competitors.

And the growing popularity of lithium has led to the creation of several new products in recent years, including the Global X Lithium ETF.