Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the rapidly growing market shares of futures speculators have destabilized commodity spot prices. We approximate conditional volatility and regress it on expected and unexpected speculative open interest....

Previous literature on price discovery in commodity markets is mainly focused on the question of whether the spot or the futures market dominates the price discovery process. Little attention, however, has been paid to the question of how the price discovery process is affected by futures...

Chinese futures markets for agricultural commodities are among the fastest growing futures markets in the world and trading behaviour in those markets is perceived as highly speculative. Therefore, we empirically investigate whether speculative activity in Chinese futures markets for...