This paper examines the conditional and unconditional mean returns and variance of returns of daily gold and silver contracts over the 1982-2002 period. Despite the importance of these metals as industrial and investment products, they have received scant attention in recent years. In...

This paper examines the optimal allocation of assets in well diversified equity based portfolio where the investor is concerned not only with mean and variance but also with the skewness of the returns. Beginning with an analysis of the rationale for concerning with skewness, the paper then...

Traditionally, analysts and traders have expected to see a stable, reasonably predictable, relationship between the price (and thus the rate of return) of gold and silver. Both these metals retain important industrial, commercial and investment uses. Recent research has cast some doubt on this...

Much academic and investor analysis and commentary sees the four main precious metals as a single market, integrated and to some degree with each metal a substitute for the other. This proposition, which can be explicit or implicit can be challenged on economic grounds and on statistical...

We assess whether two classes of bubbles occur in the spot price of gold, rational speculative and periodically bursting bubbles, using gold’s lease rates for the first time in the literature as a measure of its fundamental value. This question is of particular significance as these are the...

This paper analyzes a large set of factors that potentially influence the price of gold using Bayesian Model Averaging and Ordinary Least Squares for comparison. We examine the evolution of the importance of factors through time, the role of the time horizon (daily versus monthly),...