This paper investigates the impact of speculative trading on the commodity futures risk premium. We focus on speculators' spread positions, and study the asset pricing implications of spreading pressure on the cross-section of commodity futures returns. In an era of financialization of commodity...

We use non-public data regarding all trader-level futures positions, reported to the U.S. grain and oilseed derivatives market regulator (the CFTC), in order to describe the nature of market participants, the maturity structure of their holdings, and the aggregate position patterns for nine...

We review selectively some recent advances in the commodity futures literature. First, we discuss the literature on the diversification benefits of commodity futures and we highlight some common misconceptions. Next, we survey the commodity futures asset pricing literature. We explain why it is...

We use a unique, non-public dataset of individual trader positions in 17 U.S. commodity futures markets to provide novel evidence on those markets' financialization in the past decade. We then show that the correlation between the rates of return on commodities and equities rises amid greater...

This paper studies the trading behavior of different types of traders in commodity futures and their impact on liquidity consumption/provision as well as price discovery in the market. CME classifies each trade by its Customer Type Indicator (CTI) into four groups: a local trader who trades for...

People by and large tend to postpone their present consumption for numerous reasons. This postponement of consumption leaves them with surplus money to invest for future consumption. Amongst the number of alternatives avenues present for such investments, gold too tends to be one of them. People...

Derivatives contracts are designed to improve risk sharing in financial markets, but among them, forwards, futures and swaps often appear redundant with their underlying assets: buying the asset and storing it is equivalent to buying it later. I show that imperfect competition in a dynamic...

We use frequency-domain techniques, namely wavelets and cross-spectra, to examine the association between the daily prices of crude oil futures and daily S&P500 futures closing prices over the past several decades. We investigate contemporaneous and lag-lead relationships in levels and returns....

We evaluate price discovery in the natural gas futures and futures options markets using a transaction based approach. By sampling market maker prices, we allow for a distinction between buy and sell prices, both directly from the futures market, and implied from the options market. Information...