We employ a large dataset of physical inventory data on 21 different commodities for the period 1993-2011 to empirically analyze the behaviour of commodity prices and their volatility as predicted by the theory of storage. We examine two main issues. First, we analyze the relationship between...

In this paper we study the stochastic behavior of the prices and volatilities of a sample of six of the most important commodity markets and we compare these properties to those of the equity market. We observe a substantial degree of heterogeneity in the behavior of the series. Our findings...

This paper investigates price jumps in commodity markets. We find that jumps are rare and extreme events but occur less frequently than in stock markets. Nonetheless, jump correlations across commodities can be high depending on the commodity sectors. Energy, metal and grains commodities show...

We analyze the variance risk of commodity markets. We construct synthetic variance swaps and find significantly negative realized and expected variance swap payoffs in most markets. We find evidence of commonalities among the realized payoffs of commodity variance swaps. We also document...

Many commodity markets contain a strong seasonal component not only at the price level, but also in volatility. In this paper, the importance of seasonal behavior in the volatility for the pricing of commodity options is analyzed. We propose a seasonally varying long-run mean variance process...

In recent years, commodity markets have become increasingly popular among financial investors. In contrast to traditional markets such as equities or bonds for which many studies have identified various profitable investment strategies, less is known for commodity markets. In this paper, we...