The growing presence of financial operators in the oil market has brought about the diffusion of techniques - such as feedback trading - which lead to departures of prices from their fundamental values and increase their variability. Oil price changes are here associated with changes in stocks,...

This study introduces a non linear model for commodity futures prices which accounts for pressures due to hedging and speculative activities. The linkage with the corresponding spot market is considered assuming that a long term equilibrium relationship holds between futures and spot pricing....

Under rather general conditions Black - Scholes implied volatilities from at-the-money options appropriately quantify, in each period, the market expectations of the average volatility of the return of the underlying asset until contract expiration. The efficiency of these expectation estimates...