Recent accusations against speculators in general and long-only commodity index funds in particular, include: increasing market volatility, distorting historical price relationships, and fueling a rapid increase and decrease in commodity inflation. Some researchers have argued that these market...

Theoretical noise trader models suggest that uninformed traders can impact market prices. However, these models' conclusions depend crucially on the assumed specification for noise trader demand. This research seeks to empirically determine the appropriate demand specification for uninformed...

The forecasting ability of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Commitment’s of Traders data set is investigated. Bivariate Granger causality tests show very little evidence that traders’ positions are useful in forecasting (leading) market returns. However, there is substantial...

The objective of this report is to re-visit the “adequacy of speculation” debate in agricultural futures markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission makes available the positions held by index funds and other large traders in their Commitment of Traders reports. The results suggest...

Long-only commodity index funds have been blamed by other futures market participants for inflating commodity prices, increasing market volatility, and distorting historical price relationships. Much of this criticism is leveled without any formal empirical support or even cursory data analyses....

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a number of agencies that are involved in collecting, analyzing, forecasting, and disseminating information about the production and consumption of the corn and soybean crops (Spilka, 1983; Vogel and Bange, 1999; Lusk, 2013). Market participants...

The marginal forecast information contained in deferred futures prices is evaluated using the direct test of Vuchelen and Gutierrez. In particular, the informational role of deferred futures contracts in live cattle and hogs is assessed from the two- to twelve-month horizons. The results...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the marketing performance of wheat farmers in Illinois and Kansas over 1982-2004. The results show that farmer benchmark prices for wheat in Illinois and Kansas fall in the middle-third of the price range about half to three-quarters of the time....

This study investigates the predictability of outlook hog price forecasts released by Iowa State University relative to alternative market and time-series forecasts. The findings suggest that predictive performance of the outlook hog price forecasts can be improved substantially. Under RMSE,...