Brooks pointed to the sudden jump in Teucrium’s shares and trading volume as evidence. Shares of the ETF had been turning over at a daily volume of 300,000 to 500,000 for months. On March 4, their daily trading volume hit 27 million shares. That day, the fund took in $US183 million ($245 million); it had never before taken in more than $US35 million in a single day. Its price, which was just over $US8 on February 25, peaked at $US12.28 on March 7.

“We saw that huge run-up because it was a GameStop or an AMC,” Brooks said, referring to two meme stocks.

Amateur investors, many of whom embraced trading during the pandemic, have emerged as a force in the markets.

The huge demand caused problems. Exchange-traded funds are required to register their shares with the Securities and Exchange Commission and to seek permission from the agency to issue new shares when demand exceeds supply. For several days in March, as new money kept pouring into the Teucrium wheat ETF, it began to buy up more and more Chicago contracts. Less than an hour after the market opened March 7, the ETF ran out of shares to sell and had to halt trading briefly while it waited for the SEC to grant it permission to create more.

Brooks posited that the heavy demand from retail investors, via the Teucrium ETF, had led not only to the fund’s own shares being halted but also to the “limit up” on Chicago May futures contracts.

Others are not so sure.

Jake Hanley, a managing director and senior portfolio strategist at Teucrium, said it was “unlikely” that the ETF’s hunger for wheat futures — or trades by any other single entity, for that matter — caused the Chicago contracts to lock up. He pointed out that on March 4, Teucrium’s activity in Chicago May wheat futures accounted for less than 3 per cent of the May contracts traded that day.

“Was it one whale or not?” Hanley mused. “My instincts tell me it was just the markets reacting to the headline news,” he said. “I don’t think it was anybody in particular.

Global wheat markets experienced a lot of volatility after Russia invaded Ukraine because of worries about the supply of wheat, said Dana Schmidt, a spokesperson for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the contracts are traded. But Schmidt declined to comment on what caused the contract prices to keep hitting their daily limit. (The exchange also sets the bar for how high the price of a contract can go up in a day.) She said the wheat markets were working “as designed.”

Still, it is undeniable that retail investors played a role.

Amateur investors, many of whom embraced trading during the pandemic, have emerged as a force in the markets. Many of them gather on Reddit message boards to discuss trading tips and strategies. Early last month, the Teucrium wheat ETF became a trending topic.

On March 7, a Reddit user with the handle “quarantrader” suggested that the ETF’s price, which that day would reach its peak, could go much higher. The author of the post argued that the conflict in Ukraine would keep global wheat prices high for a long time. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit at least $US20. If you told me $US40 by July I wouldn’t even blink.”

The next day, another user, TerabyteFury, observed that “Wheat,” as a whole, was “trading at all time high prices, and is experiencing a large amount of retail volume from people like us.”

Whether or not a surge of retail money into the Teucrium ETF caused the Chicago contracts to lock up, there is no doubt that the ETF’s popularity has soared. On March 9, the SEC gave Teucrium permission to create more shares. It is now authorised to add an indefinite number without first seeking the SEC’s blessing.

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The run-up in futures prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange stopped after wheat prices began falling in other regions. But the daily trading volume for the Teucrium ETF since the price spike has oscillated between a high of just under 10 million shares on March 17 and a low of under 2 million Monday.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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