The purpose of this research report is to identify the appropriate market benchmark price to use to evaluate the pricing performance of market advisory services that are included in the annual AgMAS pricing performance evaluations. Five desirable properties of market benchmark prices are...

USDA World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) price forecasts are published as an interval, but are typically analyzed as point estimates. Thus, all information about uncertainty imbedded in the forecast is ignored. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the accuracy of WASDE...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test for bubbles in the US hard red spring (HRS) wheat market from 2004 to 2014, with particular focus on 2007-2008 when the market experienced record-high price volatility. Design/methodology/approach – The authors apply a recently developed bubble...

The ‘Masters Hypothesis’ is the claim that long-only index investment was a major driver of the 2007–2008 spike in commodity futures prices and energy futures prices in particular. Index position data compiled by the CFTC are carefully compared. In the energy markets, index position...

This article shows, for the first time, where U.S. ethanol prices are discovered across the major regional markets in the country. We adopt a bivariate approach that compares each regional market against Chicago, as it is equipped with one of the largest terminals in the U.S. and is widely...

The D4 RIN is the tradable compliance certificate for the biomass-based diesel mandate in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Understanding the price dynamics of the D4 RIN is important for understanding the RFS because its price sets a ceiling on the ethanol RIN (D6) and because some observers...