This study analyzes the potential risk reduction gains from naive diversification (equal-weighting) among market advisory services for corn and soybeans. The total possible decrease in risk through naive diversification is small, mainly because advisory prices are highly correlated on average....

This study investigates the nature of the revision process of USDA corn and soybean production forecasts over the 1970/71 through 2002/03 marketing years. Nordhaus' framework for testing the efficiency of fixed-event forecasts is used. In this framework, efficiency is based on independence of...

Marketing is viewed as an important component of the farm management process, and poor marketing is often cited as a cause of low farm incomes. However, widespread beliefs about poor performance are not based upon a large body of research, and available evidence is too limited to make definitive...

This paper describes the degree of marketing activeness of market advisory programs for corn and soybeans, and analyzes the relationship between activeness degree and pricing performance. The data set employed consists of advisory programs tracked by the AgMAS Project at the University of...

The economic value of public situation and outlook information has long been a subject of debate. The purpose of this study is to investigate the economic value of USDA reports in hog and cattle markets. The investigation is based on event study analysis, with the "events" consisting of the...

While the risk premium hypothesis in futures markets has been the subject of a long and continuous controversy, the risk premium hypothesis in forward markets is also of interest among economists. The hypothesis is supported by some theoretical arguments and empirical evidence yet remains an...

The optimal hedging model has become the standard theoretical model of normative hedging behavior due to its intuitive tradeoff of expected return with risk, its effcient use of information and its easy implementation. In practice, the model can be easily implemented with the Parameter Certainty...

Numerous empirical studies have investigated the profitability of technical trading rules in a wide variety of markets, and many of them found positive profits. Despite positive evidence about profitability and improvements in testing procedures, skepticism about technical trading profits...

This paper investigates the profitability of technical trading rules in US futures markets over the 1985-2004 period. To account for data snooping biases, we evaluate statistical significance of performance across technical trading rules using White's Bootstrap Reality Check test and Hansen's...