Trend-following trading strategies in commodity futures: A re-examination

A growing body of recent evidence suggests that premiums for financial options might be too high. For agricultural options, market participants often make similar claims, however there is very limited scientific literature to prove or disprove such claims. This research investigates the efficiency of corn and soybean options markets by directly computing trading returns. Time effects on market efficiency are also investigated. When the sample period is considered as a whole, risk adjusted returns indicate that no profits can be made by taking either side of the corn or soybean options markets. However, when time effects are analyzed, corn calls appear to have provided excess returns during the 1998--2005 period. This result do not appear to be driven by movements in the underlying futures, since similar differences were not found for corn puts. Based on the evidence presented here, corn puts and soybean options would constitute fairly-well priced insurance tools. Further research sh...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

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Journal of Futures Markets, 2009

Journal of Banking & Finance, 2007

Journal of Futures Markets 35(3), 274-297 , 2015

This article demonstrates that momentum, term structure and idiosyncratic volatility signals in commodity futures markets are not overlapping which inspires a novel triple-screen strategy. We show that simultaneously buying contracts with high past performance, high roll-yields and low idiosyncratic volatility, and shorting contracts with poor past performance, low roll-yields and high idiosyncratic volatility yields a Sharpe ratio over the 1985 to 2011 period which is five times that of the S&P-GSCI. The triple-screen strategy dominates the double-screen and individual strategies and this outcome cannot be attributed to overreaction, liquidity risk, transaction costs or the financialization of commodity futures markets.

Journal of Banking & Finance, 2015