Do Commodities Add Value in Multi-Asset-Portfolios? An Out-of-Sample Analysis for Different Investment Strategies
57 Pages Posted: 26 Apr 2014 Last revised: 20 Nov 2015
Date Written: June 21, 2015
Abstract
An essential motive for investing in commodities is to enhance the performance of portfolios traditionally including only stocks and bonds. We analyze the in-sample and out-of-sample portfolio effects resulting from adding commodities to a stock-bond portfolio for commonly implemented asset-allocation strategies such as equally and strategically weighted portfolios, risk-parity, minimum-variance as well as reward-to-risk timing, mean-variance and Black-Litterman. We analyze different commodity groups such as agricultural and livestock com-modities that currently are critically discussed. The out-of-sample portfolio analysis indicates that the attainable benefits of commodities are much smaller than suggested by previous in-sample studies. Hence, in-sample analyses, such as spanning tests, might exaggerate the ad-vantages of commodities. Moreover, the portfolio gains greatly vary between different types of commodities and sub-periods. While aggregate commodity indices, industrial and precious metals as well as energy improve the performance of a stock-bond portfolio for most asset-allocation strategies, we hardly find positive portfolio effects for agriculture and livestock. Consequently, investments in food commodities are not essential for efficient asset allocation.
Keywords: Commodities, Asset allocation models, Out-of-sample portfolio optimization, Diversification, Performance evaluation
JEL Classification: C61, G10, G11
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
The Tactical and Strategic Value of Commodity Futures
By Claude B. Erb and Campbell R. Harvey
-
The Tactical and Strategic Value of Commodity Futures
By Claude B. Erb and Campbell R. Harvey
-
The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices: Small Trends and Big Variability
-
The Fundamentals of Commodity Futures Returns
By Gary B. Gorton, Fumio Hayashi, ...
-
The Fundamentals of Commodity Futures Returns
By Gary B. Gorton, Fumio Hayashi, ...
-
Momentum Strategies in Commodity Futures Markets
By Joëlle Miffre and Georgios Rallis