Given the generally observed mean-reverting nature of spot commodity prices, it should naturally follow that across time, roll yields (and therefore, backwardation) have to be the dominant explanatory variable for individual futures contract returns over long enough time horizons. In this paper,...

Broadly speaking, there are seven strands of literature on commodity pricing theory, which we summarize as follows: The insurance role of commodity futures contracts, which emphasizes the role of the speculator; the theory of storage, which emphasizes the behavior of the inventory holder and...

In this paper, we introduce readers to commodity (natural resource) futures programs. We begin by describing the present investment landscape as one where return compression in a number of popular hedge fund strategies has led absolute-return investors to investigate other promising return...

This paper provides some preliminary contributions to the debate over the sources of return in the commodity markets, based on work that is drawn from the 2007 Risk Book, Intelligent Commodity Investing. Essentially, Till (2007) and Feldman and Till (2006) find that in examining a 55-year period...

This paper discusses how commodity returns had in the past mainly relied on portfolio effects and term-structure properties of individual commodity futures contracts. But the paper also notes that rare trend shifts, as occurred in the early 1970's, can also be a meaningful source of returns for...

This article discusses the state-of-the-art in applying returns-based analyses to hedge funds. The article pays particular attention to those hedge fund strategies where the use of either derivatives or dynamic trading strategies can lead to highly asymmetric outcomes

Hedge funds do not easily fit into the current way institutions go about investing. Based on a survey of recent academic and practitioner research, this article reviews six competing frameworks for how to incorporate hedge funds in institutional portfolios. Each framework has very different...

Academic criticism of classic Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) performance measures is not new. In particular, a number of authors have pointed out the shortcomings of using the Sharpe ratio for performance evaluation and the mean-variance framework for portfolio construction when the...