In a brief literature review, we discuss how our insight into the grounds of existence of futures markets has changed from the initial insurance perspective, to the arbitrage perspective, to the portfolio perspective, and to the current institutional perspective. We discuss futures market...

Price series that are 21.5 years long for six agricultural futures markets, corn, soybeans, wheat, hogs, coffee, and sugar, exhibit time-varying volatility, carry long-range dependence, and portray excessive skewness and kurtosis, though they are covariance stationary. This suggests that the...