Browsing: Investing in Commodities

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

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

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

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

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

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 “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

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

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

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

The Alternative Investment Management Association and Societe Generale Prime Services have together put out a white paper about managed futures funds and the commodity trading advisers who manage them. A key themes of the paper is that managed futures strategies aren’t as risky as are typical investments in equity markets.Read More

A recent blog in the TABB Forum, by Chris Barnes of Clarus Financial Technology, looks at recent developments in the realm of MiFID, and looks forward. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority in August of this year authorized certain Approved Publication Arrangements (APAs) for reporting under MiFID II.  The authorization ofRead More

Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 1, Issue 4 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is the official publication of the CAIA Association. Access to the most current issue is an exclusive benefit of CAIA Membership while archived issues are available to the public in the Perspectives section atRead More

Six years ago Michael Coscia placed orders through the CME Group’s Globex platform via a trading algorithm that amounted to “spoofing.” He placed both large and small orders in the copper market, for example, with the large orders (cancelled within milliseconds) designed to create the illusion of market movement inRead More

A new paper available at SSRN looks at two infamous commodity industry melt-downs: Amaranth and MF Global. It offers a diagnosis of each. Hilary Till, of the EDHEC – Risk Institute, and Richard Heckinger, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, share the by-line. They acknowledge research assistance from KatherineRead More

In a recent paper Mark Shore, of Shore Capital Management, has discussed overlaying of strategies in managed futures, saying that it is something he covers in his course on managed futures at DePaul, but that in general it “is not discussed as much as it should be.” Behind that question,Read More

ETF Securities (US) LLC, a New York-based asset manager and manufacturer of ETP’s (Exchange Traded Products),” has issued a white paper written by its Director, Investment Strategy, (Maxwell Gold), on “broad commodities,” that is, on the use of a broad basket of commodities, as a way of allowing an investor’sRead More

Two Maryland-based scholars have reviewed the evidence of the performance of gold mining stocks. The title of their article, which appears in the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, November 2016, puts the central question bluntly: are such stocks “more like gold or like stocks”? Let’s get the answer to that queryRead More

On November 7, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put out a statement that said that the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) had agreed to halt its controversial ongoing construction in North Dakota. The following day, which happens to have been Election Day, [so non-election news went largely uncovered], the ownersRead More

The chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Timothy Massad, addressed the Outlook Conference of the Managed Funds Association on October 21, and spoke about the global implementation of uncleared margin rules, which he called a critical component of “the new regulatory framework for swaps trading that the leaders ofRead More

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx), the company that bought the London Metal Exchange four years ago, has further expansion plans. At a recent event on the commodity markets of East Asia, Charles Li, the CEO of HKEx, spoke on this point. Li wants to create a physical metals tradingRead More

Hedge funds have now seen three consecutive months in which redemptions have exceeded new investment, for a net outflow. The net outflow for July alone was $5.7 billion. Fortunately, July also saw performance based gains of $10.5 billion, so the total assets under management grew slightly. The table below adaptedRead More

A critical revolution in the crude oil and natural gas markets began 18 years ago. Gary Sernovitz, who has given the world his thoughts on this revolution in the new book The Green and the Black, has had some convenient seats whence to observe, most recently as a managing directorRead More

I’m old enough to remember the 1970s, and to remember the economic debates in the United States at the time concerning the inflation of that era. The U.S. left the Bretton Woods system near the start of the decade, thus ushering the “free float” of currencies against one another inRead More

Last year, two scholars writing in the Journal of Alternative Investments looked at the volatility spillover effects in the Chinese stock index futures and spot markets.  The question for them was whether there is spillover from spot markets into futures markets and back. I propose to give you their answer,Read More

A paper by Xiaowei Kang and Daniel Ung, published in June 2014, remains timely because risk parity and related approaches remain the center of controversy and some confusion. The Kang & Ung paper looked at three approaches to risk factor based portfolio construction, studying specifically the practical aspects of theRead More

The consensus in market scholarship seems to be not only that “still waters run deep” but that deep waters run still. The greater the depth of volume in a commodity, the lesser the volatility of that commodity’s price. (This of course requires the usual “other things being equal” caveat.) ThisRead More

A recent CAIA member contribution by Kathryn Kaminski, director of investment strategies at Campbell & Co., discusses the quantification of CTA risk management.  It is worth a look, not least because it amounts to a warning about how underperformance can result for the re-jiggering of allocation for capacity constraints. KaminskiRead More

Context Summits has published a detailed report on the views of those who allocate money into hedge funds. Almost everybody they talked to is in on the act. Ninety-six percent of investors expect to allocate to two or more hedge funds in 2016.  A majority (57%) were prepared to investRead More

The CFTC received a last-minute pile-up of comments on proposed rule 80 FR 78824, on automated trading. The commenters generally are not in a mood to pat the agency on its intangible back and congratulate it on a job well done. Quite the contrary. The notice of proposed rule-making (NPRM)Read More