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

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