The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the last decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows either did or did not cause a price...

This paper addresses the question of whether the oil price spike of 2003-2008 was a bubble. We document and discuss what is known about the level of speculation in the paper oil market. We then analyze the dynamics of the term structure of futures prices, both during the earlier period of...

While much is known about the financialization of commodities, less is known about how to profitably invest in commodities. We develop a four-factor asset pricing model of commodity returns. Our four-factor model prices both commodity spot and term risk premia in an intuitive manner related to...

As a source of energy of biofuel and edible oil, the fluctuation of crude palm oil prices is the concern of producers and manufacturers. However, little is known about the impact of global financial crisis on informational efficiency of crude palm oil (CPO) futures market. Hence, this study aims...

Many believe that index fund investment was the main driver of the 2007-2008 spike in commodity futures prices. One group of empirical studies finds evidence that commodity index investment directly or indirectly had a substantial impact on commodity futures prices. However, the data and methods...

This paper analyses the intraday co-movements between returns on several commodity markets and on the stock market in the United States over the 1997-2011 period. By exploiting a new high frequency database, we compute various rolling correlations at (i) 1-hour, (ii) 5-minute, (iii) 10-second,...

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...

The authors examine the behavior of monthly commodity futures returns over the decade since 2004 when new investor inflows entered the asset class. The main findings are that average returns have been similar to their long-term historical means. Correlations among commodities and...

The paper develops an oil price forecasting technique which is based on the present value model of rational commodity pricing. The approach suggests shifting the forecasting problem to the marginal convenience yield which can be derived from the cost-of-carry relationship. In a recursive...