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....

Relying on the hidden Markov model improved by the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO-HMM), we develop a dual-decision method to address the issue of state-dependent futures hedging. Our approach is attractive in two ways. First, it uses the PSO algorithm to overcome the shortcomings of...