"Open interest, or the amount of contracts outstanding in futures markets, has remarkable power to forecast commodity, currency, bond, and stock prices. Changes in open interest are highly pro-cyclical and predict asset-price fluctuations better than a number of alternative variables including...

"Commodity futures risk premiums vary across commodities and over time depending on the level of physical inventories, as predicted by the Theory of Storage. Using a comprehensive dataset on 31 commodity futures and physical inventories between 1969 and 2006, we show that the convenience yield...