Commodity exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are a significant part of the rapidly growing ETF market. They have become popular in recent years as they provide investors access to a great variety of commodities, ranging from precious metals to building materials, and from oil and gas to agricultural...

This paper studies the market phenomenon of non-convergence between futures and spot prices in the grains market. We postulate that the positive basis observed at maturity stems from the futures holder's timing options to exercise the shipping certificate delivery item and subsequently liquidate...

Controlling the speed and direction of trades becomes increasingly important to algorithmic trading desks. Brian Bulthuis, Julio Concha, Tim Leung and Brian Ward propose a new optimal execution algorithm with both limit and market orders. An optimal strategy is derived analytically and...

We develop a methodology for index tracking and risk exposure control using financial derivatives. Under a continuous-time diffusion framework for price evolution, we present a pathwise approach to construct dynamic portfolios of derivatives in order to gain exposure to an index and/or market...

We study the optimal execution of market and limit orders with permanent and temporary price impacts as well as uncertainty in the filling of limit orders. Our continuous-time model incorporates a trade speed limiter and a trader director to provide better control on the trading rates. We...

Controlling the speed and direction of trades becomes increasingly important to algorithmic trading desks. Brian Bulthuis, Julio Concha, Tim Leung and Brian Ward propose a new optimal execution algorithm with both limit and market orders. An optimal strategy is derived analytically and...

We study a series of static and dynamic portfolios of VIX futures and their effectiveness to track the VIX index. We derive each portfolio using optimization methods, and evaluate its tracking performance from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Among our results, we show that static...

This paper studies the empirical tracking performance of leveraged ETFs on gold, and their price relationships with gold spot and futures. For tracking the gold spot, we find that our optimized portfolios with short-term gold futures are highly effective in replicating prices. The market-traded...