English: A graph showing the historical price of gold from 2000 through 12/19/2008. The graph is highly generalized from data garnered at kitco.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Keeping track of the price movements of commodity futures in the gold sector is definitely one of your top priorities if you are an investor in this commodity. Now the best approach in tracking the prices has to be a real time approach that gives the prices as they change every time. So why do you need to keep track of gold prices if you are an investor in the commodities futures?  Well price movements are the single most influential signals that can allow you to know whether you are making loss or profit. Furthermore they give a very good picture of the trends in the market allowing you the chance to trade accordingly. There are quite a number of ways that you can keep track of gold commodity prices - here are some of the best ones.

Many brokers will have a system of providing price signals to their investors on a real time approach. The good thing about price signals is that they come in real time numbers as the prices change. Furthermore aside from giving you the numbers many brokerage firms will have a very good analysis of the trends and what to expect later. It is often advised that you use signals from your broker and that is simply because if at you make a decision based on the numbers and something goes wrong, you can be able to hold them accountable. However in any case brokers do have the best systems to generate price signals that will indeed help you make a good decision.

Charts and graphs

Charts and graphs are very critical not actually in giving you the price movements of gold but actually the trend. The graphs and charts are presented by leading markets and are easily accessible online. What you get from a graph is simply a pictorial representation of the trends in the prices of the commodity you are trading in and in fact, these are the most effective sources of determining the trends in the price of the commodity. The problem with graphs however is that they give you the information but the decisions is all down to you. If you are a good investor though, you will find it easy to make a good call based on objective trends shown by your charts.

Moving averages

Moving averages are the most significant in determining the trends and they are the average daily price of gold that is calculated over a specific period of time, it can be a few days and even years. so how do you use the moving average to determine the trends, for example if the moving average is 50- to 100 a day, if prices move below that then the trend is on the low and that means you need to act. However if they move above then there is a good trend in the commodity