Exploiting the dynamics of commodity futures curves

Commodity Futures: A Japanese Perspective*

We study the basic properties of an equally weighted index of U.S. commodities futures from the perspective of a Japanese investor. We find that the returns on the U.S. equally-weighted commodity futures index maintain their basic properties documented in Gorton and Rousenhorst (2005), when translated into Yen. In particular, looking at returns on Japanese stocks and bonds, the commodity future...

Commodity futures and market efficiency

a r t i c l e i n f o We analyze the market efficiency of 25 commodity futures across various groups—metals, energies, soft commodities , grains and other agricultural commodities. To do so, we utilize the recently proposed Efficiency Index to find out that the most efficient among all of the analyzed commodities is heating oil, closely followed by WTI crude oil, cotton, wheat, and coffee. On t...

Portfolio Diversification with Commodity Futures: Properties of Levered Futures

The Futures Market: A Valuable Commodity

The agricultural goods futures market has recently regained the interest of corporate business, research institutions, and governments. This renewed interest is brought about by the increasing volatility of the prices of agricultural raw materials. In turn, these reflect the shift that has taken place in the European Union’s joint agricultural policy: from price support to income support and to...

Optimal portfolios in commodity futures markets

We consider portfolio optimization in futures markets. We model the entire futures price curve at once as a solution of a stochastic partial differential equation. The agents objective is to maximize her utility from the final wealth when investing in futures contracts. We study a class of futures price curve models which admit a finite-dimensional realization. Using this, we recast the portfol...