The investment in commodities is starting to be more important during the last years. The paper describes the characteristics of financially important commodities. In many cases a passive investment in an index is most suitable. As the GSCI is found to be the most important, its underlying...

We study how the exposure of fundamental and financial traders affects the futures curve of WTI oil and the market integration between WTI and Brent as measured by their price spread. To obtain a parsimonious representation of the futures curve, we decompose it into a level-, a slope- and a...