IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2011-254.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do Commodity Futures Help Forecast Spot Prices?

Author

Listed:
  • Mr. David A Reichsfeld
  • Mr. Shaun K. Roache

Abstract

We assess the spot price forecasting performance of 10 commodity futures at various horizons up to two years and test whether this performance is affected by market conditions. We reject efficient markets based on in-sample tests but, out-of-sample, we find that the forecast from the futures market is hard to beat. We find that the forecasting performance of futures does not depend on the slope of the futures curve, in contrast to the predictions of well-known models of commodity markets. We also find futures' forecasting performance to be invariant to whether prices are in an upswing or downswing, casting doubt on aspersions that uninformed investors participating during bull markets impede the price discovery process.

Suggested Citation

  • Mr. David A Reichsfeld & Mr. Shaun K. Roache, 2011. "Do Commodity Futures Help Forecast Spot Prices?," IMF Working Papers 2011/254, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2011/254
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=25325
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Williams,Jeffrey C. & Wright,Brian D., 2005. "Storage and Commodity Markets," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521023399, September.
    2. Clark, Todd E. & West, Kenneth D., 2007. "Approximately normal tests for equal predictive accuracy in nested models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 138(1), pages 291-311, May.
    3. Menzie D. Chinn & Olivier Coibion, 2014. "The Predictive Content of Commodity Futures," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(7), pages 607-636, July.
    4. Clements,Michael & Hendry,David, 1998. "Forecasting Economic Time Series," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521634809.
    5. Cashin, Paul & McDermott, C. John & Scott, Alasdair, 2002. "Booms and slumps in world commodity prices," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 277-296, October.
    6. Robert S. Pindyck, 2001. "The Dynamics of Commodity Spot and Futures Markets: A Primer," The Energy Journal, , vol. 22(3), pages 1-29, July.
    7. Trevor A. Reeve & Robert J. Vigfusson, 2011. "Evaluating the forecasting performance of commodity futures prices," International Finance Discussion Papers 1025, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    8. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 2002. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 134-144, January.
    9. Ms. Nese Erbil & Mr. Shaun K. Roache, 2010. "How Commodity Price Curves and Inventories React to a Short-Run Scarcity Shock," IMF Working Papers 2010/222, International Monetary Fund.
    10. Vansteenkiste, Isabel, 2011. "What is driving oil futures prices? Fundamentals versus speculation," Working Paper Series 1371, European Central Bank.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Leung, Charles Ka Yui & Shi, Song & Ho Tang, Edward Chi, 2013. "Commodity house prices," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(6), pages 875-887.
    2. Xu Xiaojie, 2018. "Using Local Information to Improve Short-Run Corn Price Forecasts," Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization, De Gruyter, vol. 16(1), pages 1-15, January.
    3. Bohl, Martin T. & Stephan, Patrick M., 2013. "Does Futures Speculation Destabilize Spot Prices? New Evidence for Commodity Markets," Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Southern Agricultural Economics Association, vol. 45(4), pages 1-21, November.
    4. Albuquerquemello, Vinícius Phillipe de & Medeiros, Rennan Kertlly de & Jesus, Diego Pitta de & Oliveira, Felipe Araujo de, 2022. "The role of transition regime models for corn prices forecasting," Revista de Economia e Sociologia Rural (RESR), Sociedade Brasileira de Economia e Sociologia Rural, vol. 60(2), January.
    5. Bernardina Algieri & Matthias Kalkuhl, 2019. "Efficiency and Forecast Performance of Commodity Futures Markets," American Journal of Economics and Business Administration, Science Publications, vol. 11(1), pages 19-34, June.
    6. Kertlly de Medeiros, Rennan & da Nóbrega Besarria, Cássio & Pitta de Jesus, Diego & Phillipe de Albuquerquemello, Vinicius, 2022. "Forecasting oil prices: New approaches," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 238(PC).
    7. Mustanen, Dmitri & Maaitah, Ahmad & Mishra, Tapas & Parhi, Mamata, 2022. "The power of investors’ optimism and pessimism in oil market forecasting," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C).
    8. Benjamin Beckers & Samya Beidas-Strom, 2015. "Forecasting the Nominal Brent Oil Price with VARs—One Model Fits All?," IMF Working Papers 2015/251, International Monetary Fund.
    9. Tao Xiong & Miao Li & Jia Cao, 2023. "Do Futures Prices Help Forecast Spot Prices? Evidence from China’s New Live Hog Futures," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-16, August.
    10. Thomas St rdal Gundersen & Even Soltvedt Hvinden, 2021. "OPEC's crude game: Strategic Competition and Regime-switching in Global Oil Markets," Working Papers No 01/2021, Centre for Applied Macro- and Petroleum economics (CAMP), BI Norwegian Business School.
    11. Rubaszek Michal & Karolak Zuzanna & Kwas Marek & Uddin Gazi Salah, 2020. "The role of the threshold effect for the dynamics of futures and spot prices of energy commodities," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, De Gruyter, vol. 24(5), pages 1-20, December.
    12. Oya Celasun & Mr. Lev Ratnovski & Miss Roxana Mihet, 2012. "Commodity Prices and Inflation Expectations in the United States," IMF Working Papers 2012/089, International Monetary Fund.
    13. Markos Farag, Stephen Snudden, Greg Upton, 2024. "Can Futures Prices Predict the Real Price of Primary Commodities?," LCERPA Working Papers jc0145, Laurier Centre for Economic Research and Policy Analysis, revised 2024.
    14. Phillip A. Cartwright & Natalija Riabko, 2019. "Do spot food commodity and oil prices predict futures prices?," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 53(1), pages 153-194, July.
    15. Mishra, Vinod & Smyth, Russell, 2016. "Are natural gas spot and futures prices predictable?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 178-186.
    16. Algieri, Bernardina & Kalkuhl, Matthias, 2014. "Back to the Futures: An Assessment of Commodity Market Efficiency and Forecast Error Drivers," Discussion Papers 187159, University of Bonn, Center for Development Research (ZEF).
    17. Alexandra Dwyer & James Holloway & Michelle Wright, 2012. "Commodity Market Financialisation: A Closer Look at the Evidence," RBA Bulletin (Print copy discontinued), Reserve Bank of Australia, pages 65-77, March.
    18. Muthucattu Thomas Paul, 2018. "The Issues and Implications About the Volatility of the Stock and the Bond Prices and Their Returns and the Volatility of Interest Rates and Inflation - Which Are Being Researched in Finance and Macro," Applied Economics and Finance, Redfame publishing, vol. 5(2), pages 125-142, March.
    19. Marek Kwas & Michał Rubaszek, 2021. "Forecasting Commodity Prices: Looking for a Benchmark," Forecasting, MDPI, vol. 3(2), pages 1-13, June.
    20. Xiaojie Xu, 2020. "Corn Cash Price Forecasting," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 102(4), pages 1297-1320, August.
    21. Talipova, Aminam & Parsegov, Sergei G. & Tukpetov, Pavel, 2019. "Russian gas exchange: A new indicator of market efficiency and competition or the instrument of monopolist?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    22. Nixon, Dan & Smith, Tom, 2012. "What can the oil futures curve tell us about the outlook for oil prices?," Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Bank of England, vol. 52(1), pages 39-47.
    23. Donders, Pablo & Jara, Mauricio & Wagner, Rodrigo, 2018. "How sensitive is corporate debt to swings in commodity prices?," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 237-258.
    24. Bertrand Gruss, 2014. "After the Boom–Commodity Prices and Economic Growth in Latin America and the Caribbean," IMF Working Papers 2014/154, International Monetary Fund.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Baumeister, Christiane, 2021. "Measuring Market Expectations," CEPR Discussion Papers 16520, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Christiane Baumeister & Lutz Kilian & Xiaoqing Zhou, 2013. "Are Product Spreads Useful for Forecasting? An Empirical Evaluation of the Verleger Hypothesis," Staff Working Papers 13-25, Bank of Canada.
    3. Kilian, Lutz & Baumeister, Christiane, 2014. "A General Approach to Recovering Market Expectations from Futures Prices With an Application to Crude Oil," CEPR Discussion Papers 10162, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Fernandez, Viviana, 2020. "The predictive power of convenience yields," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    5. Hardy, Nicolás & Ferreira, Tiago & Quinteros, Maria J. & Magner, Nicolás S., 2023. "“Watch your tone!”: Forecasting mining industry commodity prices with financial report tone," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 86(PA).
    6. Maryam Movahedifar & Hossein Hassani & Masoud Yarmohammadi & Mahdi Kalantari & Rangan Gupta, 2021. "A robust approach for outlier imputation: Singular Spectrum Decomposition," Working Papers 202164, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    7. Christiane Baumeister & Lutz Kilian, 2015. "Forecasting the Real Price of Oil in a Changing World: A Forecast Combination Approach," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(3), pages 338-351, July.
    8. Rossi, Barbara, 2013. "Advances in Forecasting under Instability," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1203-1324, Elsevier.
    9. Kenneth S. Rogoff & Vania Stavrakeva, 2008. "The Continuing Puzzle of Short Horizon Exchange Rate Forecasting," NBER Working Papers 14071, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Zuzanna Karolak, 2021. "Energy prices forecasting using nonlinear univariate models," Bank i Kredyt, Narodowy Bank Polski, vol. 52(6), pages 577-598.
    11. Rehman, Mobeen Ur & Owusu Junior, Peterson & Ahmad, Nasir & Vo, Xuan Vinh, 2022. "Time-varying risk analysis for commodity futures," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    12. Barbara Rossi, 2019. "Forecasting in the presence of instabilities: How do we know whether models predict well and how to improve them," Economics Working Papers 1711, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jul 2021.
    13. Pagano Patrizio & Pisani Massimiliano, 2009. "Risk-Adjusted Forecasts of Oil Prices," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 9(1), pages 1-28, June.
    14. Ben Zeev, Nadav & Pappa, Evi & Vicondoa, Alejandro, 2017. "Emerging economies business cycles: The role of commodity terms of trade news," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 368-376.
    15. Valenti, Daniele & Manera, Matteo & Sbuelz, Alessandro, 2020. "Interpreting the oil risk premium: Do oil price shocks matter?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    16. Shiu-Sheng Chen, 2016. "Commodity prices and related equity prices," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 49(3), pages 949-967, August.
    17. Shiu-Sheng Chen, 2014. "Forecasting Crude Oil Price Movements With Oil-Sensitive Stocks," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 52(2), pages 830-844, April.
    18. Markos Farag, Stephen Snudden, Greg Upton, 2024. "Can Futures Prices Predict the Real Price of Primary Commodities?," LCERPA Working Papers jc0145, Laurier Centre for Economic Research and Policy Analysis, revised 2024.
    19. Lof, Matthijs & Nyberg, Henri, 2017. "Noncausality and the commodity currency hypothesis," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 424-433.
    20. Sung Je Byun, 2017. "Speculation in Commodity Futures Markets, Inventories and the Price of Crude Oil," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 5).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2011/254. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.