Financialization of commodity markets ten years later

Abstract

In this study, we examine whether the key findings in Tang and Xiong (2012) hold in the more recent sample years after their publication. We also explore the impact of financialization on different aspects of commodity futures markets in more detail. Our analysis shows that financialization leads to a significant increase of the correlation between the commodity and stock market returns. This return correlation structure change is robust to different commodity and stock market return computation methods, and is persistent for the more recent post-Tang-and-Xiong-(2012) subsample period. We find that after financialization, the importance of non-commercial traders elevates, the pairwise correlation between the indexed commodity futures increases, and the basis becomes more negative on commodity futures markets.