Investing in stocks, futures, etc without knowing what you're doing is basically gambling. With a commodity like cocoa you probably won't lose everything like a typical stock might (it's easy to buy a single stock at $2/share and see it tank to $0.01) so it's less scary.

Usually people just get an index fund and hope "line goes up" and it usually does because we live in a terrible place.

Like, am I shooting myself in the foot by not investing spare money?

1,000% No. I’m telling you from someone who used to work in that industry, if you try to play the market you might as well just go to the roulette wheel, you might have better odds and at least that’s fun. I could go into all math and financial theory if you want, but the reality is that most of the people who devote their lives to this stuff aren’t making any more money than they would just putting everything in an index fund.

That said, if you have money set aside and you don’t need it until many years in the future, I mean as long as global capitalism doesn’t collapse there’s a good chance that by investing in broad passive index funds, you’ll do better than having your money in a checking account. But that’s on a long time horizon and it assumes you won’t need this money if you lose your job or something (because the worst investing you can do is to buy in conditions as they are now, the market goes down, you lose your job and need the money so you sell those index funds when they were low after you bought high.

That is a bubble and you should not invest in cocoa beans ffs

I've got like 3 boxes of chocolate bars ready to sell

Oh, i was joking. commodities are unpredictable (somewhat). I've heard speculation that cocoa will explode like half a year ago due to el nino, but at the same time, heard the same about copper due to renewables and it is steady 0 percent change in a year. Or that gold will collapse due to interest rates, but its growing lol. At the same time gambling on futures seems somewhat more honest you don't take money out of surplus labor (well not directly), you gamble against and with porkies.

As for how to do it, depends what incentives your work has, idk american shit with 401k matching contributions etc, but there are etfs which track commodities prices for plebs. Or you can cocoon in stock market etf (i think its sus idea at current ai bs at s&p500, but what do i know)

Gambling is highly dependent on your personality as well, if you are gambling person, buy stock market etf and don't look at it. With 90 percent chance you will lose and get health issues due to stress with gambling. As for the no iphoning yourself, you can either see it as pascal's wager on communism (either it happens and your investment not important or it wont) or just buy t-bills like a boomer and be subversive about it by going to cuba when 5 percent interest accumulates .