The Simple Economics of Commodity Price Speculation

The Simple Economics of Commodity Price Speculation

The price of crude oil in the U.S. never exceeded $40 per barrel until mid-2004. By 2006 it reached $70, and in July 2008 it peaked at $145. By late 2008 it had plummeted to about $30 before increasing to $110 in 2011. Are speculators at least partly to blame for these sharp price changes? We clarify the effects of speculators on commodity prices. We focus on crude oil, but our approach can be ...

A (S,s) Model of Commodity Price Speculation

Price Destabilizing Speculation

The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. It is sometimes asserted that rational speculative activity must result in more stable prices because speculators buy when prices are low and sell when they are high. This is incorrect. Speculators buy when the chances of price appreciation are high, selling when the chan...

Investor Psychological Bias and Speculation: Asymmetric Impacts of Big Data on Commodity Price

This research attempts to propose a new measure of investor psychological bias with big data crawled from the web. The author constructs the investor bias measure with web search data and investigate the influences of this new measure on crude oil futures prices. Using 225,250 data points from Google, this paper computes the investor bias, and evaluates it with trading volumes. The author estab...

Econometric Methods for Endogenously Sampled Time Series: The Case of Commodity Price Speculation in the Steel Market