Browsing: Commodities

By Adam A. Rozencwajg, CFA, Managing Partner, Geohring & Rozencwajg Oil prices joined bond yields in doing the unthinkable: trading at negative levels. In the case of oil, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) May 2020 contract reached a low of -$40.32 at 2:24 pm before rallying back to finish the day atRead More

The brief history of replication funds may already be divided into three waves, the third of which is still in formation. The first wave was about democratization: putting hedge fund strategies in the hands of people who cannot meet the accreditation requirements to invest in hedge funds proper, or ofRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Central Issue of the Paper If you’re a social media junkie, you have probably seen “#goals” in your timeline. In most cases, the hashtag is referring to an attractive couple or an aesthetically pleasing plate of food.Read More

The Republic of France, in March 2019, decided that it would no longer consider fuel made from palm oil to be a “biofuel,” effective as of January 2020. So that  redefinition is now in effect. Meanwhile, the EU recently set tariffs on palm oil coming in from Indonesia or Malaysia:Read More

It is reasonable to expect that a diversified hedge fund portfolio will make more modest returns in 2020 than it did in 2019, according to Agecroft Partners, which has done its usual January crystal-ball gazing on the new year, looking for the top industry trends and how they may playRead More

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has changed the rules for the managers of commodity pools. The new regulations, approved in November and published in the Federal Register for Dec. 10, take effect on Thursday, January 9, 2020. Some key points about these changes: They have codified Family Office No-Action Letters,Read More

Ray Dalio, in reference to the current financial scene, with its long period of expansion over more than a decade has said, “This set of circumstances is unsustainable and certainly can no longer be pushed…[which] is why I believe that the world is approaching a big paradigm shift.” Dalio hasRead More

Liquified natural gas has long been sold through long-term contracts that are benchmarked to the price of crude oil. This makes a certain intuitive sense. The two commodities are in many contexts substitutes, so that one would expect a rise in the prices of one to inspire an echoing riseRead More

Willem Kooyker is folding up his tent at Blenheim Capital, the commodities-focused hedge fund headquartered in an office park in Berkeley Heights, N.J. Kooyker is a legend. In 1981, he went to work at Commodities Corp., Princeton, N.J., where he was a peer of Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon, andRead More

The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index was up in August, 0.17%, easily outperforming the global equity market, as measured by MSCI ACWI, which was down 2.37%. The August number brings the Eurekahedge HFI’s year-to-date result to 6.58%. Approximately 32.6% of the funds Eurekahedge tracks are in double-digits (positive) territory for theRead More

T. Boone Pickens died quietly at home in Dallas, Texas on Sept. 11, 2019. In his long career Pickens did a good deal to give the current hedge fund industry, as well as the broader asset management industry and the energy commodities markets, their character, in a life that sometimesRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION The mafia and the hedge fund industry share some characteristics. Both are powerful, non-transparent, and create little value for society. Naturally the mafia is a criminal organization while the only “criminal” element of hedge funds are the high fees they are charging forRead More

Diane Merritt, of the Closed-End Fund Association (CEF) spoke recently with Axel Merk, of Merk Investments, about precious metals as part of a portfolio, and specifically the role these metals can play late in the business cycle: which, according to a rather broad consensus, is where we now are. TheRead More

A recent publication by two executives of State Street Associates identifies a new factor in currency turns, which it calls the “equity differential.” In effect, it argues for the viability of a trading strategy based on this factor. The paper argues that the differential in trailing equity market performance stronglyRead More

A new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development surveys the main quantitative investment restrictions to which pension funds and other pension providers are subject in both OECD countries and a selection of International Organization of Pension Supervisors’ (IOPS) member countries. It reminds us of the general desireRead More

The last two years have seen record low levels of mergers and acquisitions activity in the oil and gas sector in the United States. There are other signs of lassitude in the field: a record low volume of PE deals, (more of that in a moment), and only six initialRead More

Red ink spoiled an otherwise positive 2019 for he Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index. The decline of 0.71% leaves the year-to-date performance still well up, at +4.32%. Approximately 41.6% of the funds Eurekahedge tracks were in the black for the month. And 15% have generated double-digit gains year-to-date. North America-mandated hedgeRead More

The agricultural sector is under pressure from several directions, including depressed commodity prices, increased regulation, climate change, and changes in consumer tastes. This pressure creates a demand for technological progress, and that in turn creates a market for agtech. Two years ago, Finisterre Ventures and Pitchbook combined their data gatheringRead More

CFTC Commissioner Daniel Berkovitz recently spoke to the FIA Commodities Symposium, in Houston, Texas, about the reduction of systemic risks and the strengthening of market integrity under the Dodd-Frank Act. He gave the usual disclaimer, that the views he expressed in this address were his own not those of theRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION Investing is challenging as it is complex and complicated, which requires continuous learning and updating of mental frameworks. Conflicts and contradictions are found everywhere. For example, data from the mutual fund industry shows that most funds fail to outperform their benchmarks, but investors inRead More

On Feb. 1, ICE Futures US Inc., informed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it was instituting a new “speed bump,” formally called the Passive Order Protection (or POP) Functionality for its gold daily and silver daily futures markets. The idea of POP is to limit the advantage that canRead More

Renewable energy, however defined, is widely seen as a sustainable and socially responsible (and, if the investing is done right, very profitable) addition to one’s portfolio. Indeed, such entities as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an Ohio based research-and-analysis shop, exist to show that renewables are theRead More

Bart Chilton, a senior adviser at DLA Piper who was from 2007 to 2014 a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, passed away April 27. Chilton had a colorful reputation in the largely grey-hued world of commodities regulation. President George W. Bush appointed Chilton to the CFTC at aRead More

Oliver Wyman, the international consulting group, has posted a white paper about commodity trading in the face of the “relentless erosion in trading margins” since 2014. The paper estimates, moreover, that margins will continue to decline for at least the next five years because commodity markets will continue to becomeRead More

Observers have long noticed that the relationship between return shocks and equity price volatility is asymmetric. That is, positive shocks do not have a marked effect on volatility; negative shocks do. Fischer Black wrote on the subject more than 40 years ago. Recently there has been a good deal ofRead More

A recent study of public employee retirement systems in the United States reaches conclusions, that, after a fair amount of “grey tsunami” alarmism in recent years, sound reassuring. The study, based on a recent survey of system managements conducted by the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS) inRead More

Two scholars affiliated with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Canada, have taken a look at the future of green bonds, that is, bonds whose proceeds are employed to fund environmental initiatives. The paper, by Olaf Weber and Vasundhara Saravade, begins with a guesstimate as to the amount ofRead More

A new paper from State Street Global Advisors takes a sociological approach to the search for alpha in emerging market nations. It contends that the “major theme for growth” in the emerging markets moving forward will be “based on the rise of the middle class and rising consumption in theseRead More

The VIX may be about to get some competition. VIX is the “fear gauge,” the very visible measure of expected price fluctuations in the S&P 500 index options. On the foundation of its popularity, CBOE has built a monopoly on exchange-traded volatility products. VIX derivatives have become among the mostRead More

A new study by two scholars, an American and an Italian, presents evidence that financial markets are pricing the risk of reliance upon carbon, penalizing carbon-intensive assets and rewarding low-carbon assets. Irene Monasterolo and Luca de Angelis, respectively of Boston University and the University of Bologna, begin with the ParisRead More

A recent article in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management  takes a fresh look at a familiar issue:  whether the development of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and related instruments tracking the commodities industry (or, in short, the financialization of commodities) has had an impact on the volatility of the pricesRead More

An agtech-focused venture firm has issued a report about global VC activity across agtech and its subsectors. The firm, Finistere Ventures, which describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” collaborated with Pitchbook in preparing the review. Finistere looks specifically at: (a) macro trends,Read More

The Principal Traders Group of the Futures Industry Association (FIA PTG) recently offered its thoughts on market structure, outlining one direction of reform for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Reg NMS. Reg NMS (National Market System) was promulgated in 2005, in order to ensure competition among markets, and in theRead More

On Sept. 24, the 9th Annual Inside Alternatives and Asset Allocation event convenes at Wynn Las Vegas, with CAIA sponsorship. The purpose of the event: to look beyond traditional alternative investments and strategies, to take the measure of a new breed of alternatives, including impact/SRIs, cryptocurrencies, and the application ofRead More

The “round number effect” is an endless source of fascination in the worlds of both trading and statistics. Human brains, after all, tend to think in round numbers. A market pundit on television may say, “If the price of stock XYZ gets below $8.00, it’ll be worth buying.” He won’tRead More

It is generally acknowledged that there exists a positive association between business risk and audit fees. There is room for dispute as to what that means. On the one hand, the riskier clients for whom an audit firm works might simply be the ones that have the most complicated books,Read More

A recent report by the Bank of Italy looks at why the various banks of Italy use derivatives. Specifically, the central bank of that country wanted to know: is it a matter of hedging? Or is it a matter of keeping a proprietary book? Hedge fund managers and other pursuersRead More

By Don Steinbrugge It is no secret that the vast majority of investors, including hedge funds managers, have underperformed market indices over time. However, some managers have distinguished themselves generating very strong risk adjusted returns. Outperforming an index requires an information advantage over what is broadly available in market.  ItRead More

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently (on July 26) disapproved of proposed rules changes that would have greenlit listing of the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust on the Bats BZX Exchange.  In essence, the SEC has now rejected the listing of a Bitcoin exchange-traded product (ETP) on a national exchange. TheRead More

A new paper, by Adriano Tosi, of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, looks at the mispricing of a cross-section of international option returns, which suggests that there is money to be made (in more decorous language a “positive risk premium” may be “commanded,”) by selling exchange-traded products and buying theRead More

Cryptocurrencies are increasingly traded on centralized exchanges, such as Gemini and Coinbase. This fact itself has generated some resentment in the crypto world, because the very idea of  centralized exchange seems to violate the original anarchic animating spirit of the cryptocurrencies, even of “Satoshi” himself. Vitalik Buterin, who as the creatorRead More

BarclayHedge says that its flash estimate for the Barclay CTA Index shows a 0.05% loss in June, and a 2% loss year to date. More remarkably, the flash estimate shows a 16.23% drop in June and a 45.43% drop YTD for the CryptoCurrency Traders Index. The founder and president ofRead More

A new study of volatility in commodity prices indicates that both the total and the decomposed variance risk premiums of at least certain commodities markets contain information with predictive power. The variance risk premium is the pay-off of the synthetic variance swap contract. Specifically, it’s the difference between the floatingRead More

Herbert Stein, who was President Richard Nixon’s chairman of the Counsel of Economic Advisors, is often quoted as saying, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This statement, known as “Stein’s Law,” has the right ring of profundity about it, a mixture of tautology and empirically verifiable generalization.Read More

On April 23, 2018, the chairman and the president of the Chicago Board Options Exchange issued an open letter to address concerns that the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) is subject to manipulation. There were at least two incitements behind this letter. First, its authors, Chairman Ed Tilly and President ChrisRead More

The two commissions that serve as market enforcers in the United States, the Commodity Futures Exchange Commission and the Securities Exchange Commission, agree on a lot. (As, indeed, one would hope, since their work has considerable overlap.) One of the points on which the commissions have general agreement is theRead More

The U.S. is withdrawing from a multilateral agreement with Iran that was aimed at dissuading the Iranian regime from further progress toward nuclearization. In the meantime, the U.S. and its allies have bombed Syria in retaliation for that country’s chemical attacks on its people, and a shake-up in the topRead More

A new Index Flash Update from Eurekahedge says that hedge funds are off to a positive start to 2018. The industry globally gained 2.26% in January. Among developed world mandates, North American hedge funds were up 1.89%, followed by those of Japan and Europe, which gained 1.28% each. Higher numbersRead More

The World Gold Council has recently posted its analysis of the continued relevance of gold. As one might expect from the source, the WGC finds that gold is a strategic asset that can play several valuable roles in a portfolio. Toward this end, the paper offers a chart of gold’sRead More

A recent publication from Ceres, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting sustainability as a goal in both investing and corporate governance, looks at the value that early-stage clean energy products offer venture capitalists. The publication is the work of a team of five “lead authors and key contributors,” including threeRead More