The purpose of the study is to examine the existence of a risk premium in futures markets to determine if hedgers pay speculators for protection against adverse price movements. Hartzmark (1987) addressed this same question but his time period of study from 1977 to 1981 is limited and outdated....

The "Masters Hypothesis" is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure from new financial index investors created a massive bubble in agricultural futures prices at various times in recent years. This paper analyzes the market impact of financial index investment in agricultural futures...

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...

Poor convergence performance of CBOT corn, soybean, and wheat futures contracts since late 2005 has been a major source of concern to market participants, regulators, and elected representatives at the state and national levels. After careful review of available evidence, it appears that recent...

Futures funds fool investor's money to speculate in futures market. Due to favorable tax treatment, futures funds are usually organized as limited partnerships within the United States. Typically, an affiliate or subsidiary of a brokerage company acts as general partner. If limited partnership...

The objective of this report is to re-visit the quot;adequacy speculation quot; debate in agricultural futures markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission makes available the positions held by index funds and other large traders in their Commitment of Traders reports. The results suggest...

Numerous empirical studies have investigated the profitability of technical trading rules in a wide variety of markets, and many of them found positive profits. Despite positive evidence about profitability and improvements in testing procedures, skepticism about technical trading profits...

The purpose of this report is to improve understanding of USDA crop forecasting methods, performance and market impact. A review of USDA's forecasting procedures and methodology confirmed the objectivity and consistency of the forecasting process over time. No changes in methodology occurred in...

The purpose of this research report is to evaluate the pricing performance of market advisory services for the 1995-2004 corn and soybean crops.Five basic indicators of performance are applied to advisory program prices and revenues over 1995-2004. Results show that advisory program prices fall...

The purpose of this research report is to evaluate the pricing performance of market advisory services for the 1995-2003 corn and soybean crops. Market and farmer benchmarks are developed for the performance evaluations. Two market benchmarks are specified in order to test the fragility of...