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In May, Credit Suisse Group and Deutsche Bank AG began offering investments in iron ore, a component of steel. About one billion tons of iron ore is mined a year but isn’t traded on a futures exchange. So it has been virtually impossible for speculators to bet on price movements.

The investment banks were inundated with interest in iron-ore deals, which function like futures contracts. In just two months, investors and hedgers took on more than $500 million of notional exposure — about 2.7 million metric tons — making this one of the biggest commodities markets to spring up almost overnight.

The new markets show how hard it will be for legislators to curb commodities speculation. Such trading is spreading to an array of other goods, from jet fuel to chicken, that have been off-limits to investors because they aren’t traded on futures markets. They also are offered for commodities already bought and sold on global exchanges, including crude oil, corn and coffee.

Through Goldman Sachs Group Inc., clients can invest in palm oil and other biofuel components. Deutsche Bank is trading ruthenium, an obscure metal used in fountain pens. Along with other firms, Deutsche is expanding into rhodium, used in catalytic converters.

Deals are being teed up in lithium and “rare earth” metals, including components of electric and hybrid cars. One Credit Suisse list reads like a science textbook: alumina, cobalt, molybdenum, ferrochrome and vanadium.

“The model is virtually limitless,” said Kamal Naqvi, a 36-year-old, London-based Credit Suisse executive who helped create the new platform after joining the bank last year. In July alone, Credit Suisse was asked to put together similar contracts by producers of wood chips, chicken and potash
fertilizer.

Some lawmakers have been alarmed by the surge in investments by big institutions such as pension funds and university endowments, which allocate money to commodities tied to indexes that track futures exchanges. Big institutions have about $260 billion invested in commodities, up from $13 billion five years ago, hedge-fund manager Michael Masters told Congress earlier this summer.

These “index speculators,” he testified, were driving up prices of oil and other natural resources. Several senators agreed, responding with bills that would limit what investors can channel into commodities they don’t intend to own.

Many economists and investors balk at the bills, attributing high commodities prices to demand from emerging economies and production squeezes. Often, they hold out iron ore as evidence: Even though it wasn’t traded on a futures exchange, its price surged in the last year. The price Chinese steelmakers pay to Australian mines, for example, has nearly doubled.

“It is not that the flow of money has no impact,” said Mr. Naqvi, the Credit Suisse executive. “But this flow . . . is a distant second to the impact of market expectations on physical supply and demand fundamentals.”

If passed, the legislation could complicate contracts linked to exchanges. The bills, investors and bankers said, are inadvertently helping nurture these nascent, over-the-counter markets. That worries some critics.

In June, Mr. Masters urged Congress to investigate the iron-ore contracts and similar deals, claiming they could help investors buy natural resources, sit on them until their price rises and then sell them. “This is Wall Street innovation run amok,” he said in an interview.

“He misunderstood our product,” said Mr. Naqvi. “There is no requirement to take physical delivery at any point, so there is no encouragement to physically hoard.”

Credit Suisse’s contracts are offered by a London unit that is an alliance with Glencore International AG, a Swiss commodities company. The alliance has about 75 people in London, New York, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Sydney.

Though clients can obtain physical assets through Glencore, Credit Suisse isn’t directly involved in any physical transactions, other than its precious-metals business in Zurich. The alliance helps Credit Suisse collect information about commodities and pass it onto clients in exchange for more trading business.

These instruments have implications for the way money flows into commodities. Historically, if someone sought to profit from iron ore, they could buy shares in a producer or a mine, but not the underlying assets.

“Iron ore is probably the largest commodity market in the world that hasn’t had financial trading around it,” said Raymond Key, the global head of metals trading for Deutsche Bank in London.

Under the contracts, known as “cash-settled swaps,” the client — a hedge fund, pension fund or steelmaker — agrees to pay a fixed price for iron ore in the future. Now, it stands at about $180 per metric ton. The bank lines up a seller that wants to lock in a price.

Credit Suisse’s minimum transaction is 5,000 metric tons. No physical delivery is taken. Instead, every month, there is a net payment in cash of the difference between the set price and a floating price pegged to an index of the spot price that steelmakers pay for iron ore that is delivered immediately.