IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/10595.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures

Author

Listed:
  • Gary Gorton
  • K. Geert Rouwenhorst

Abstract

We construct an equally-weighted index of commodity futures monthly returns over the period between July of 1959 and March of 2004 in order to study simple properties of commodity futures as an asset class. Fully-collateralized commodity futures have historically offered the same return and Sharpe ratio as equities. While the risk premium on commodity futures is essentially the same as equities, commodity futures returns are negatively correlated with equity returns and bond returns. The negative correlation between commodity futures and the other asset classes is due, in significant part, to different behavior over the business cycle. In addition, commodity futures are positively correlated with inflation, unexpected inflation, and changes in expected inflation.

Suggested Citation

  • Gary Gorton & K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 2004. "Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures," NBER Working Papers 10595, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10595
    Note: AP
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10595.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James D. Hamilton, 1985. "Historical Causes of Postwar Oil Shocks and Recessions," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 1), pages 97-116.
    2. Hamilton, James D., 2003. "What is an oil shock?," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 113(2), pages 363-398, April.
    3. Shigeyuki Hamori & Naoko Hamori & David A. Anderson, 2001. "An Empirical Analysis of the Efficiency of the Osaka Rice Market During Japan's Tokugawa Era," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 21(9), pages 861-874, September.
    4. Dennis W. Carlton, 1984. "Futures markets: Their purpose, their history, their growth, their successes and failures," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 4(3), pages 237-271, September.
    5. Hamilton, James D, 1983. "Oil and the Macroeconomy since World War II," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(2), pages 228-248, April.
    6. Jagannathan, Ravi, 1985. "An Investigation of Commodity Futures Prices Using the Consumption-based Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(1), pages 175-191, March.
    7. Schwert, G William, 1981. "The Adjustment of Stock Prices to Information about Inflation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 36(1), pages 15-29, March.
    8. Black, Fischer, 1976. "The pricing of commodity contracts," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(1-2), pages 167-179.
    9. Bessembinder, Hendrik, 1992. "Systematic Risk, Hedging Pressure, and Risk Premiums in Futures Markets," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 5(4), pages 637-667.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gary Gorton & K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 2004. "Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures," NBER Working Papers 10595, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Gary Gorton & K. Rouwenhorst, 2004. "Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2619, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Mar 2005.
    3. Dbouk, Wassim & Jamali, Ibrahim, 2018. "Predicting daily oil prices: Linear and non-linear models," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 149-165.
    4. Arturo Lorenzo Valdés & Rocío Durán Vázquez & Leticia Armenta Fraire, 2012. "Conditional Correlation Between Oil and Stock Market Returns: The Case of Mexico," Remef - Revista Mexicana de Economía y Finanzas Nueva Época REMEF (The Mexican Journal of Economics and Finance), Instituto Mexicano de Ejecutivos de Finanzas, IMEF, vol. 7(1), pages 49-63, Enero-Jun.
    5. Radosław Puka & Bartosz Łamasz & Marek Michalski, 2021. "Effectiveness of Artificial Neural Networks in Hedging against WTI Crude Oil Price Risk," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-26, June.
    6. Łamasz Bartosz & Iwaszczuk Natalia & Ivashchuk Oleksandr, 2018. "Selected methods of securing the refining sector against crude oil price fluctuations," International Journal of Management and Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of World Economy, vol. 54(3), pages 197-209, September.
    7. Luís Aguiar-Conraria & Maria Soares, 2011. "Oil and the macroeconomy: using wavelets to analyze old issues," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 40(3), pages 645-655, May.
    8. Ioannidis, Christos & Ka, Kook, 2018. "The impact of oil price shocks on the term structure of interest rates," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 601-620.
    9. Jo, Soojin & Karnizova, Lilia & Reza, Abeer, 2019. "Industry effects of oil price shocks: A re-examination," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 179-190.
    10. Kline, Patrick, 2008. "Understanding Sectoral Labor Market Dynamics: An Equilibrium Analysis of the Oil and Gas Field Services Industry," Working Papers 43, Yale University, Department of Economics.
    11. Ramey, V.A., 2016. "Macroeconomic Shocks and Their Propagation," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 71-162, Elsevier.
    12. Francesco Ravazzolo & Philip Rothman, 2013. "Oil and U.S. GDP: A Real-Time Out-of-Sample Examination," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 45(2-3), pages 449-463, March.
    13. Luciana Juvenal & Ivan Petrella, 2015. "Speculation in the Oil Market," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(4), pages 621-649, June.
    14. Gatfaoui, Hayette, 2016. "Linking the gas and oil markets with the stock market: Investigating the U.S. relationship," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 5-16.
    15. Nima Ebrahimi & Craig Pirrong, 2020. "Oil jump risk," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(8), pages 1282-1311, August.
    16. Conrad, Christian & Loch, Karin & Rittler, Daniel, 2012. "On the Macroeconomic Determinants of the Long-Term Oil-Stock Correlation," Working Papers 0525, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    17. Symeonidis, Lazaros & Prokopczuk, Marcel & Brooks, Chris & Lazar, Emese, 2012. "Futures basis, inventory and commodity price volatility: An empirical analysis," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 2651-2663.
    18. de Roon, F.A. & Nijman, T.E. & Veld, C.H., 1997. "Analyzing specification errors in models for futures risk premia with hedging pressure," Other publications TiSEM 2c531bb0-c2ca-457b-aa10-d, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    19. Loïc Maréchal, 2023. "A tale of two premiums revisited," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(5), pages 580-614, May.
    20. Meenagh, David & Minford, Patrick & Oyekola, Olayinka, 2015. "Oil Prices and the Dynamics of Output and Real Exchange Rate," Cardiff Economics Working Papers E2015/18, Cardiff University, Cardiff Business School, Economics Section.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:10595. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.