Approaches to Price Formation in Financialised Commodity Markets

Main author: van Huellen, Sophie
Format: Journal Article           
Online access: Click here to view record


Summary: A recent debate about the financialisation of commodity markets has stimulated the development of new approaches to price formation which incorporate index traders as a new trader category. I survey these new approaches by retracing their emergence to traditional price formation models and show that they arise from a synthesis between commodity arbitrage pricing and behavioural pricing theories in the tradition of Keynesian inspired hedging pressure models. Based on these insights, I derive testable hypotheses and provide guidance for a growing literature that seeks to empirically evaluate the effects of index traders on price discovery in commodity futures markets.