Commodity prices are significantly more volatile than prices of industrial products. The main functions of futures trading being hedging against, and speculation on price fluctuations; and it is hedging, that determines the role of speculation.

A parimutuel market microstructure for contingent claims trading is proposed and analyzed. A parimutuel microstructure is a call auction where relative equilibrium prices of contingent claims are endogenously determined using a specific mechanism. We propose a market microstructure incorporating...

Since trading cannot take place continuously, the optimal portfolio calculated ina continuous-time model cannot be held, but the investor has to implement thecontinuous-time strategy in discrete time. This leads to the question how severe theresulting discretization error is. We analyze this...