VIX futures prices rose slowly in late February and early March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Futures price premiums, defined as futures prices minus real-time statistical forecasts of future VIX values, turned sharply negative and remained negative until mid-April. Trading strategies...

This article investigates the pricing of volatility risk in agricultural commodity markets. We show theoretically that the cost of bearing volatility risk can be measured using returns to delta-neutral straddles. Using a sample of options for five commodities (corn, soybeans, Chicago wheat, live...

Annual rebalancing of the S&P GSCI index provides a novel and strong identification to estimate the shape of supply curves for commodity futures contracts. Using the 24 commodities included in the S&P GSCI for 2004–2017, we show that cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) reach a peak of 59 basis...

This paper examines the usefulness of commodities in an investor's portfolio. Using data on three generations of commodity indices and 15 individual commodity futures for 1991–2015, we find that incorporating most commodity products does little to improve the portfolio's Sharpe ratio...