Rational expectations and commodity price forecasts

The main purpose of this paper is to take a new look at the commodity market (CM) price forecasts in light of recent investigations. The CM forecasts are similar in nature to the survey expectations in that both solicit market experts'opinions about future price developments. However, there are important differences: CM forecasts are more of the consensus-type forecasts than survey data and deal with physical goods that are subject to different risks and constraints. The characteristics of the CM forecasts are reviewed in relation to the futures prices of the same commodities. This paper also estimates the alternative expectational models and tests the rationality of the expectational behavior.