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....

As the world's largest importer, trading of iron ore occupies a pivotal position in China's international trade. In order to seek the decision power of deciding the price for iron ore, China's Dalian Commodity Exchange (DCE) listed iron ore futures in October 2013,which has become the world's...