A cooperative effort in which funds contributed by a number of people are combined in order to trade commodity futures or options contracts. Professional traders and investment managers make the decisions about which investments to make, thereby relieving the individual investors of the investment research and decision-making process. By combining funds with other investors, individuals can obtain access to a larger range of investments and size of trade than by doing their own trading. Commodity pools work on a similar concept as mutual funds for individual stock and bond investors.