Using hand-collected data of commodity futures contracts going back to 1877, we replicate in the pre-sample history the well-documented cross-sectional commodity factor premia of momentum, value and basis. All three premia remain significantly positive in the additional 80-plus years of...

We derive stock returns for firms producing nonrenewable commodities by employing the investment-based asset pricing approach. By identifying the appropriate time-varying discount rate the investment-based approach allows an alternative test of the Hotelling Valuation Principle. The empirical...

In recent years, commodity markets have become increasingly popular among financial investors. In contrast to traditional markets such as equities or bonds for which many studies have identified various profitable investment strategies, less is known for commodity markets. In this paper, we...

The paper explores different portfolio structures for a passive commodity investment. It finds that an equally-weighted portfolio of up to 30 commodities delivers a Sharpe ratio similar to that of equity indexes and Treasury bonds, with much lower volatility than popular commodity indexes....

This paper investigates the impact of speculative trading on the commodity futures risk premium. We focus on speculators' spread positions, and study the asset pricing implications of spreading pressure on the cross-section of commodity futures returns. In an era of financialization of commodity...

The detrended implied volatility of commodity options (VOL) forecasts the cross section of the commodity futures returns significantly. A zero-cost strategy that is long in low VOL and short in high VOL commodities yields an annualized return of 12.66% and a Sharpe ratio of 0.69. Notably, the...

In this paper we investigate risk premiums in commodity convenience yields. The analysis consists of two steps. First, we use a three-factor model to extract monthly convenience yields from a broad sample of commodity futures. Second, we estimate multi-factor asset pricing models with...

Options on crude oil futures are the most actively traded commodity options. We develop a class of computationally efficient discrete-time jump models that allow for closed-form option valuation, and we use crude oil futures and options data to investigate the economic importance of jumps and...

The commodity futures basis—the difference between the first and second futures prices—is known to forecast commodity futures returns, arguably through its relation with the convenience yield. We propose a refined measure of the basis, dubbed the relative basis, which is the difference...

Using a novel comprehensive database of 230 commodity futures that traded between 1871 and 2018, we document that futures prices have on average been set at a discount to future spot prices by about 5%. The historical risk premium is robust across commodity sectors and varies with the state of...