Cocoa like most commodities has received a lot of attention over the past few years, with China and India growing it has seen a steady increase in demand. However if you don’t have a futures account and don’t want to learn how they work how can you benefit from cocoa’s increasing price? Simple, you can use a stock that has a strong correlation to the commodity.

Open up a brokerage account. You will first need a brokerage account. There are tens of these companies online such as Etrade, Scott Trade, or Ameritrade. Just make sure that they are members of FINRA and SIPC.

Trade a cocoa related stock. Hershey Foods (HSY) is one of the biggest users of cocoa for its products. As such when the price of cocoa goes up the price of Hershey stock tends to decline as their profits go down. You can use this relationship to make money. For instance the price of cocoa generally tends to peak on or around March 14th and continues to decline until on or about April 16th. As such this is a good time to be a holder of HSY since the price of the stock tends to climb.

Trade options. If you’d like to get a bit of leverage on this you can also trade options on HSY. This will give you more flexibility as it will allow you to use different strategies such as spreads or writing covered calls.