This paper examines the time variations of expected momentum profits using a two-state Markov switching model with time-varying transition probabilities to evaluate the empirical relevance of recent rational theories of momentum profits. We find that in the expansion state the expected returns...

We construct downside variance risk premiums from the crude oil and gold option data and use them as proxies for market downside uncertainty risks. We find that these downside variance risk premiums contain commodity market specifc pricing information. Further- more, the gold market's exposure...