Commodity Market Heterogeneity and Cross-Market Integration

Abstract

We evaluate the recent levels of heterogeneity and cross-market integration for fluctuations in commodity futures returns for a post-financial-crisis data sample. We find that a single commodity-market risk factor explains 30.6% of the total variation in commodity futures returns. The commodity-market risk factor is significantly correlated with the dominant market-wide risk factors from other asset classes: +66.7% with a market risk factor for the US equity market; -74.2% with a US dollar risk factor for the FX market; and -27.8% with an interest-rate level risk factor for the US interest rate market. Thus, a part of the systematic variation in the commodity market is integrated with other asset classes.