The Financial Industry’s Challenge of Developing Commodity Derivatives

With a constant new stream of financial services coming to the market, each often more exotic and complicated than the last, the financial services industry, which includes commodity derivatives exchanges, brokerage houses and banks providing price risk reduction services (the so-called hedging services), is one of the fastest growing industries. In order to assure survival, these companies show a rapid product innovation. However, for commodity derivatives the risk of failure is considerable. This paper presents a new and integrative approach towards commodity derivatives management, which makes it easier to gain insight into the viability of new commodity derivatives before introduction, to assess and improve the viability of existing commodity derivatives and to provide the managers of the financial services industry with information about the tools they can use in the product development process of commodity derivatives.