Farmers and other buyers and sellers of commodities use options in their marketing strategies. A cost of buying put and call options is the decay in option premium that occurs from the time an option position is established until the time the option position is closed out. This article finds...

This study examines the long run relationship between 1-day and 3-month futures prices for five metals at the London Metal Exchange (LME) and further investigates the role of interest rates in this relationship. A battery of stationarity tests and cointegration tests are applied to a simple cost...

This study uses quantile regressions to estimate historical forecast error distributions forWASDE forecasts of corn, soybean, and wheat prices, and then compute confidencelimits for the forecasts based on the empirical distributions. Quantile regressions with fiterrors expressed as a function of...

This article tests the efficiency of the hog options market and assesses the impact of the 1996 contract redesign on efficiency. We find that the hog options market is efficient, but some options yielded excess returns during the live hogs period but not during the lean hogs period. Our findings...

It is commonly asserted that speculative buying by index funds in commodity futures andover–the–counter derivatives markets created a ‘‘bubble’’ in commodity prices, with the resultthat prices, and crude oil prices, in particular, far exceeded fundamental values at the peak.The...

Economists and others need estimates of future cash price volatility to use in risk management evaluation and education programs. This paper evaluates the performance of alternative volatility forecasts for fed cattle, feeder cattle, and corn cash price returns. Forecasts include time series...

We estimate the cost of post-harvest forward contracting corn and soybeans for January and March delivery from 1980 through 2009. For both corn and soybeans we saw a downward trend in the cost of forward contract for January delivery and we conclude that the cost of forward contracting for...

This study investigates empirical methods of generating prediction intervals for WASDE forecasts of corn, soybean, and wheat prices over the 1980/81 through 2006/07 marketing years. Empirical methods use historical forecast errors to estimate forecast error distributions, which are then used to...

The lack of consistently acceptable convergence performance for Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) corn, soybean, and wheat contracts since late 2005 has been widely discussed (e.g., Henriques, 2008).1 Convergence performance is summarized in Figure 1, depicting delivery location basis levels on the...

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...