Recent accusations against speculators in general and long-only commodity index funds inparticular, include: increasing market volatility, distorting historical price relationships, andfueling a rapid increase and decrease in commodity inflation. Some researchers have argued thatthese market...

It is commonly asserted that speculative buying by index funds in commodity futures andover–the–counter derivatives markets created a ‘‘bubble’’ in commodity prices, with the resultthat prices, and crude oil prices, in particular, far exceeded fundamental values at the peak.The...

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a number of agencies that are involved in collecting, analyzing, forecasting, and disseminating information about the production and consumption of the corn and soybean crops (Spilka, 1983; Vogel and Bange, 1999; Lusk, 2013). Market participants...

Recent accusations against speculators in general and long-only commodity index funds in particular, include: increasing market volatility, distorting historical price relationships, and fueling a rapid increase and decrease in commodity inflation. Some researchers have argued that these market...

It is commonly asserted that speculative buying by index funds in commodity futures and over–the–counter derivatives markets created a ‘‘bubble’’ in commodity prices, with the result that prices, and crude oil prices, in particular, far exceeded...

The forecasting content of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Commitments of Traders (COT) report is investigated. Bivariate Granger causality tests show very little evidence that traders’ positions are useful in forecasting (leading) returns in 10 agricultural futures...

The purpose of this research report is to evaluate the pricing performance of market advisory services for the 1995-2004 wheat crops. Explicit marketing assumptions are applied to the track records in order to produce consistent and comparable results across the different advisory programs. Each...