Not much of a headline is it? I mean, what more can be said about the market for agribusiness company stocks but that investors seem to prefer them more than the physical commodities in which the firms deal.

It's really a just a matter of relative strength and it's eminently playable by retail customers. First things first, though. Let's look at the trend.

We can monitor the strength of agribusiness at a glance with the Market Vectors Agribusiness Fund (NYSE Arca: MOO), an exchange-traded tracker of the DAXglobal Agribusiness Index. The fund's 44 stocks include companies dealing in agriproducts and livestock operations, agricultural chemicals and equipment as well as ethanol and biodiesel.

Global agribusiness has been no slouch this year. A buoyant equity market and a weaker U.S. dollar have propelled the Market Vectors portfolio to a 36.1% year-to-date gain.

The stuff these firms deal in - corn, soybeans, sugar and wheat - are represented in the PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund (NYSE Arca: DBA), an equally weighted, and fully margined, array of commodity futures. The DBA fund is based upon the ag subset of the Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index (DBLCI).

This year, the DBA portfolio has risen 5.3%

Relative Strength (MOO vs. DBA)

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Owning the Market Vectors fund would have produced your gain with a standard deviation, or risk, of 57.1%. That's a lot of volatility. The DB fund, meanwhile, cranks out its return with a 32.7% volatility.

If you could buy the MOO and short DBA, you could quite literally trade the relative strength trend depicted above, with less volatility than owning the Market Vectors portfolio outright. Such a strategy may not be your cup of investment tea, however. You'd be obliged to use a margin account to short DBA, and that precludes many accounts - retirement accounts, specifically - from employing the strategy.

There are, fortunately, inverse exchange-traded notes based upon the DBLCI agriculture subindex that can be purchased within any account. Buying the PowerShares DB Agriculture Short ETN (NYSE Arca: ADZ), for example, is something like shorting DBA, while purchasing the PowerShares DB Agriculture Double Short ETN (NYSE Arca: AGA) produces returns something like doubling down on a DBA short.

Notice I said "something like," not "just like." There are some keen differences between the DBA and the ADZ/AGA securities besides their directional bias. DBA is a portfolio made of actual futures contracts, complete with frictional transaction costs - the gains and losses associated with the rotation of contracts within the portfolio. Quite literally, the ETF shares can be swapped (by large traders anyway) for the futures contracts held within.

ADZ and AGA, on the other hand, are not ETFs. They're notes, debt obligations of Deutsche Bank's London branch, with a value based upon the fluctuations of the index that DBA follows. There's no recourse to an actual portfolio here. The investor takes on credit risk, relying upon Deutsche Bank to remain solvent enough to honor its obligation and lend value to the notes in the secondary market.

Buying MOO together with ADZ gives you the opportunity to play the agribusiness advantage with little small volatility. Your gains and losses will, in great part, look like the relative strength trend line. Year-to-date, based upon market value, the trade would have made 10.9% with only 22.9% risk.

In today's market, that's a pretty good reward-to-risk ratio.

ADZ + MOO