We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

Agricultural futures markets can provide useful information to farmers for taking more informed planting decisions for their crops, which are forward looking, and thus reduce their market risk. But in India, agri-futures have gone through a roller-coaster ride since their mega opening in 2003,...

In light of the recently passed 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, we assess the effect of margin changes on prices, the risk-sharing between speculators and hedgers, and the price stability of 20 commodity futures markets. We find that margin increases decrease the rate at which prices change, yet they...