IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v40y2016i1p327-348..html

Keynes and the interwar commodity option markets

Author

Listed:
  • Maria Cristina Marcuzzo
  • Eleonora Sanfilippo

Abstract

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, options began to be widely employed in the main financial centres in Europe and the USA for trading in spot and futures markets. From 1921 onward, Keynes embarked upon investment in these derivatives mainly—but not exclusively—in the commodity markets, showing a true fascination for this method of speculation. This type of financial investment he pursued mainly in the 1920s, with only a few operations undertaken during the 1930s. The option markets in which Keynes traded were metals—in particular copper, lead, spelter and, especially, tin. Besides metals, Keynes dealt in options also in other commodity markets, such as rubber and linseed oil, and sparingly in ordinary stocks and government securities. In this paper we offer a reconstruction of Keynes’s speculative activity in commodity options, drawing on the archival material kept in the Keynes Papers held at King’s College, Cambridge. This reconstruction is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely new to the literature and aims to provide an analysis of this particular aspect of Keynes’s investment behaviour, investigating his capacity to predict market trends and offering a preliminary assessment of his performance.

Suggested Citation

  • Maria Cristina Marcuzzo & Eleonora Sanfilippo, 2016. "Keynes and the interwar commodity option markets," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 40(1), pages 327-348.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:40:y:2016:i:1:p:327-348.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/bev017
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina & Sanfilippo, Eleonora, 2022. "Keynes's personal investments in the London Stock Exchange and his views on the transformation of the British economy," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 512-526.
    2. Chambers, David, 2019. "Commodity Option Pricing Efficiency before Black Scholes Merton," CEPR Discussion Papers 13975, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Woods, John E, 2021. "Benjamin Graham on Buffer Stocks," OSF Preprints qdv3n, Center for Open Science.
    4. Stephan Schulmeister, 2019. "Keynes und die Finanzmärkte. Auf halbem Weg vom "homo oeconomicus" zum "homo humanus"," WIFO Working Papers 588, WIFO.
    5. Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina & Sanfilippo, Eleonora, 2025. "Why Was Keynes Keen To Invest In American But Not In British Investment Trusts?," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, vol. 47(1), pages 92-115, March.
    6. Carlo Cristiano & Maria Cristina Marcuzzo & Eleonora Sanfilippo, 2018. "Taming the great depression: Keynes’s personal investments in the US stock market, 1931–1939," Economia Politica: Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics, Springer;Fondazione Edison, vol. 35(1), pages 13-40, April.
    7. repec:osf:osfxxx:qdv3n_v1 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. repec:osf:socarx:gtre7_v1 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. David Chambers & Rasheed Saleuddin, 2020. "Commodity option pricing efficiency before Black, Scholes, and Merton," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 73(2), pages 540-564, May.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B26 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Financial Economics
    • B31 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought: Individuals - - - Individuals
    • N20 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • N50 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - General, International, or Comparative

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:40:y:2016:i:1:p:327-348.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.