Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the rapidly growing market shares of futures speculators have destabilized commodity spot prices. We approximate conditional volatility and regress it on expected and unexpected speculative open interest....

We consider a market model that consists of financial investors and producers of a commodity. Producers optionally store some production for future sale and go short on forward contracts to hedge the uncertainty of the future commodity price. Financial investors take positions in these contracts...