How Valuable are the Commodity Assets to Investors?

This study examines how commodity assets affect investors. Our main findings can be summarized as follows. First, the Sharpe ratio of commodity indexes is higher than that of stocks and bonds over the last ten years. Second, commodity (traditional) assets are positively (negatively) related with inflation, which implies that commodity assets provide better hedge against inflation. Third, a break-even analysis indicates that including commodity assets in diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds enhances the performance of the portfolio. Fourth, the numeraire portfolio approach of Hentschel et al.(2002) shows that, to some extent, there are gains by including commodity assets in a portfolio of stocks and bonds. For example, transaction cost of 0 to 92 basis points would keep a log-utility investor from including the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI) in one’s portfolio. In sum, commodity assets enhance the performance of portfolio, and the performance gain is especially pronounced during the bear stock market.