Should Investors Include Commodities in Their Portfolios After All? New Evidence

56 Pages Posted: 5 Aug 2010 Last revised: 27 Nov 2011

See all articles by Charoula Daskalaki

Charoula Daskalaki

University of Crete, Department of Economics

George S. Skiadopoulos

University of Piraeus, Department of Banking and Financial Management; Queen Mary, University of London, School of Economics and Finance

Date Written: November 26, 2011

Abstract

This paper investigates whether an investor is made better off by including commodities in a portfolio that consists of traditional asset classes. First, we revisit the posed question within an in-sample setting by employing mean–variance and non-mean–variance spanning tests. Then, we form optimal portfolios by taking into account the higher order moments of the portfolio returns distribution and evaluate their out-of-sample performance. Under the in-sample setting, we find that commodities are beneficial only to non-mean–variance investors. However, these benefits are not preserved out-of-sample. Our findings challenge the alleged diversification benefits of commodities and are robust across a number of performance evaluation measures, utility functions and datasets. The results hold even when transaction costs are considered and across various sub-periods. Not surprisingly, the only exception appears over the 2005–2008 unprecedented commodity boom period.

Keywords: Asset allocation, Commodity boom, Commodity futures, Commodity indexes. Spanning, Performance evaluation

JEL Classification: G10, G11, G12

Suggested Citation

Daskalaki, Charoula and Skiadopoulos, George and Skiadopoulos, George, Should Investors Include Commodities in Their Portfolios After All? New Evidence (November 26, 2011). Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 35, No. 10, 2011, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1652699

Charoula Daskalaki

University of Crete, Department of Economics ( email )

Rethymno, Crete GR-74100
Greece

George Skiadopoulos (Contact Author)

Queen Mary, University of London, School of Economics and Finance

Lincoln's Inn Fields
Mile End Rd.
London, E1 4NS
United Kingdom

University of Piraeus, Department of Banking and Financial Management ( email )

80 Karaoli & Dimitriou Str.
18534 Piraeus, 185 34 -GR
Greece

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/view/george-skiadopoulos

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
1,344
Abstract Views
5,514
Rank
27,434
PlumX Metrics