Even with the month of January now almost over, it's still not too late to look at how another group of commodity ETFs and ETNs did in the year that just concluded - metals.
Earlier this month, the performance of Energy ETFs and ETNs in 2009 was examined and it was quickly learned that, while it was a good year for both investors in these commodities and the underlying commodities themselves, the returns on the former fell far short of the gains for the latter.
In one of the more extreme examples of this phenomenon, while the price of crude oil rose some 78 percent last year, the popular United States Oil Fund (NYSEArca:USO) finished with a gain of just 19 percent, no doubt leaving a large number of folks with money invested in this sector wondering what all the fuss over rising oil prices was all about.
The results were even worse for natural gas where investors suffered huge losses even though natural gas futures ended the year about where they began.
As it turns out, the wicked contango that crimped investment returns in energy commodities last year was all but absent for the entire metals group and investors who were able to set aside worries about a "gold bubble" and ignore reports about Chinese pig farmers storing large quantities of copper wire out back (and borrowing money against those rolls of wire to purchase even more) saw great returns.
After a tumultuous few years for every metal except for gold - the metal whose price rose steadily through the entire previous decade, much to the consternation of the editors at Money Magazine - prices for both precious metals and base metals ended 2009 far higher than where they began as shown below.
And, last year, the good news for investors in the 25 related ETFs/ETNs (by my count) for which full-year data was available is that they saw about the same gains as in the metals themselves, in some cases even more.
Before getting to the metal ETF/ETN returns, it's worth looking closely at the last four years of data in the table above to see what, if anything, can be gleaned from it.
The first observation that can be made is that gold was the…
