Commodity Price Dynamics

Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders and policy makers who want to better understand often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminium to oil to soybeans to zinc.

Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders, and policy makers who want to better understand often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminum to oil to soybeans to zinc.

Since a major source of income for many countries comes from exporting commodities, price discovery and information transmission between commodity futures markets are key issues for continued economic development. Commodities: Fundamental Theory of Futures, Forwards, and Derivatives Pricing, Second Edition covers the fundamental theory of and derivatives pricing for major commodity markets, as well as the interaction between commodity prices, the real economy, and other financial markets. After a thoroughly updated and extensive theoretical and practical introduction, this new edition of the book is divided into five parts – the fifth of which is entirely new material covering cutting-edge developments. Oil Products considers the structural changes in the demand and supply for hedging services that are increasingly determining the price of oil Other Commodities examines markets related to agricultural commodities, including natural gas, wine, soybeans, corn, gold, silver, copper, and other metals Commodity Prices and Financial Markets investigates the contemporary aspects of the financialization of commodities, including stocks, bonds, futures, currency markets, index products, and exchange traded funds Electricity Markets supplies an overview of the current and future modelling of electricity markets Contemporary Topics discuss rough volatility, order book trading, cryptocurrencies, text mining for price dynamics and flash crashes

Since a major source of income for many countries comes from exporting commodities, price discovery and information transmission between commodity futures markets are key issues for continued economic development. This book covers the fundamental theory of and derivatives pricing for major commodity markets as well as the interaction between commodity prices, the real economy, and other financial markets. After an extensive theoretical and practical introduction, the book is divided into four parts: Oil Products – considers the structural changes in the demand and supply for hedging services that are increasingly determining the price of oil Other Commodities – examines markets related to agricultural commodities, including natural gas, wine, soybeans, corn, gold, silver, copper, and other metals Commodity Prices and Financial Markets – investigates the contemporary aspects of the financialization of commodities, including stocks, bonds, futures, currency markets, index products, and exchange traded funds Electricity Markets – supplies an overview of the current and future modelling of electricity markets With contributions from well-known academics and practitioners, this volume includes coverage of the fundamental theory of futures/forwards and derivatives pricing for major commodity markets. The contributions to Sections I and II of this volume, which treat storable or agricultural commodities, take speculation into account through a consideration of markets over time being either in backwardation or contango. Up-to-date considerations of both trading and investment are included in Sections I, II, and III. The book also reviews the effects of urbanization and the expanding middle-class population on commodities.

As commodity markets have continued their expansion an extensive and complex financial industry has developed to service them. This industry includes hundreds of participating firms, including asset managers, brokers, consultants, verification agencies and a myriad of other institutions. Universities and other training institutions have responded to this rapid expansion of commodity markets as well as their substantial future growth potential by launching specialized courses on the subject. The Economics of Commodity Markets attempts to bridge the gap between academics and working professionals by way of a textbook that is both theoretically informative and practical. Based in part on the authors’ teaching experience of commodity finance at the University Paris Dauphine, the book covers all important commodity markets topics and includes coverage of recent topics such as financial applications and intuitive economic reasoning. The book is composed of three parts that cover: commodity market dynamics, commodities and the business cycle, and commodities and fundamental value. The key original approach to the subject matter lies in a shift away from the descriptive to the econometric analysis of commodity markets. Information on market trends of commodities is presented in the first part, with a strong emphasis on the quantitative treatment of that information in the remaining two parts of the book. Readers are provided with a clear and succinct exposition of up-to-date financial economic and econometric methods as these apply to commodity markets. In addition a number of useful empirical applications are introduced and discussed. This book is a self-contained offering, discussing all key methods and insights without descending into superfluous technicalities. All explanations are structured in an accessible manner, permitting any reader with a basic understanding of mathematics and finance to work their way through all parts of the book without having to resort to external sources.

In an era defined by financial upheaval, few parts of the economy have witnessed the kind of volatility seen in commodities markets. In this book, Blake Clayton, a Wall Street analyst and adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, draws on the latest thinking from academia and the private sector to deliver a clear-eyed analysis of pressing questions at the intersection of commodity markets, natural resource economics, and public policy. The result is a work that challenges the conventional wisdom about how these markets function and provides a fresh perspective on what public policy can do to improve them.