Investors face significant barriers in evaluating the performance of hedge funds and commodity trading advisors (CTAs). The only available performance data comes from voluntary reporting to private companies. Funds have incentives to strategically report to these companies, causing these data...

The correlation structure of the world equity markets varies considerably over the past 150 years. We show that correlations were high during periods of economic and financial integration. We decompose the benefits of international diversification into two parts: a component that measures...

We test a Wall Street investment strategy, pairs trading, with daily data over 1962-2002. Stocks are matched into pairs with minimum distance between normalized historical prices. A simple trading rule yields average annualized excess returns of up to 11 percent for selffinancing portfolios of...

Commodity futures risk premiums vary across commodities and over time depending on the level of physical inventories. The convenience yield is a decreasing, non-linear function of inventories. Price measures, such as the futures basis, prior futures returns, prior spot returns, and spot price...

International equity markets exhibit short-term return continuation. Between 1980 and 1995 an internationally diversified portfolio of past short-term winners outperformed a portfolio of short-term losers by more than one percent per month, after correcting for risk. Return continuation is...

This paper reviews the literature on commodities from the perspective of an investor. We re-examine some of the early papers in the literature using recent data, and find that the empirical support for the Theory of Normal Backwardation as an explanation for the commodity risk premium is weak,...

We study the basic properties of an equally-weighted index of U.S. commodity 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 Rouwenhorst (2005), when...

This note is a response to a recent paper by Erb and Harvey (2005). We show that diversification returns are mathematical properties of geometric averages of index returns, and not due to rebalancing. We also show how rebalancing affects the performance of the equal-weighted commodity futures...