General Public Finally Realizes Commodities ETFs are Terrible

Chart taken from WSJ.com

Today the Wall Street Journal ran an article describing why commodities ETFs are terrible instruments with which to make long-term commodities plays.  The crux is that, largely because of the roll yield, ETFs do not actually track the prices of the commodities they purport.  Readers of this blog may remember that I wrote a functionally identical article nearly three years ago, first at HardAssetsInvestor, and a bit later right here on AssetPrime.

Briefly, the vast majority of commodities markets follow a normal futures curve, wherein the prices for contracts of a commodity further out are more expensive than the contracts closer to expiration.  That is, in February of a given year, the price for March widgets would be cheaper than the price for July widgets.  (People usually call this situation "contango"; and while that's not technically correct, it's not worth getting into the semantic distinction in this article, other than to acknowledge that people are going to be using that word to describe a normal futures curve.)  Most commodities ETFs work by holding the front month contract of a given commodity, then selling that contract shortly before expiration and replacing it with the next month in the futures chain.  If, indeed, the market is in a normal futures curve, the next month contract in the chain will be more expensive than the contract approaching expiration.  Selling low and buying high does not typically a profit make.  Hence, even when the price of a commodity is increasing over time, much of that value may be lost to the monthly roll-yield penalty.

This is important, because the entire purpose of a commodities ETF is to track the price of a commodity, thereby providing investors exposure to those markets.  Significantly, most commodities ETFs do not do this.  At all.  Commodities ETFs do not do the one thing they were created to do.  Commodities ETFs are terrible.

Roll yield explained, from iPath ETN prospectus

Interestingly, many of the banks that issue these ETFs (or ETNs, as the case may be) have gotten more upfront about the issue.  The iPath commodities ETN page, for instance, discusses the roll yield before even listing the funds one can invest in, and their "iPath Commodity ETNs" pdf sheet includes a handy graphic (displayed at right) explaining the nature of the problem.  (Incorrectly, of course, calling a normal futures curve "contango" but again, that discussion belongs elsewhere.)  I have to admit that I'm impressed at the level of disclosure by iPath here; I don't know the extent to which a bank is even required to do this.  However, while the facts given are certainly correct, the prospectus fails to mention that the majority of the time, the market is in a normal futures curve ("contango") rather than an inverted curve when a fund would potentially make money ("backwardation") from the roll yield.  That is, they fail to mention that most of the time, the roll yield is a bad thing.

Some banks, of course, have gotten wise to this problem and have implemented funds that attempt to avoid the pitfalls of the standard roll yield.  The United States 12 Month Oil Fund (USL), for instance,  (cousin to the much more popular USO fund) holds all twelve futures contracts for the upcoming year (one for each month) rather than just the front month contract.  iPath (mentioned above) offers a series of Commodities ETNs that use a proprietary algorithm to select which contract a fund should hold.  The basics of the strategy are overviewed in their document "Basics of iPath Pure Beta Commodity ETNs" on the iPath website.  I examined USL in the aforementioned HardAssetInvestor article and found a much better statistical correlation between that fund and the price of oil compared to similar funds.  I haven't had a chance to dig into the iPath Pure Beta ETNs (having just learned about them), but I'm very curious to know how good they actually are at mitigating the roll yield.  You can be sure I'll report back here with any and all findings.

Even if it's coming three years too late, I'm glad to see folks are finally waking up to this.  Most commodities ETFs that hold futures contracts simply don't do a good job tracking the prices of commodities.

Going Long on Election Knowledge - Investing in Information with the IEM

The most valuable commodity is information.  I could hit the thesaurus and start coming up with different words for "information", but I won't do that - you get the point.  Every investment one makes is, despite its underlying instruments, at its core, an investment in information.  Whether you think a particular grain or metal will go up or down in value is the direct consequence of your information and the faith you have therein.  In that way, buying a stock, or a gold contract, or a mutual fund, in essence, can be considered an investment in an information derivative.  As a general rule, I'm not much of a fan of derivatives, whenever possible I prefer to invest in an instrument directly.  Lucky for folks like me, there happens to exist a market that trades directly in information.

The Iowa Electronic Markets is commonly referred to as a stock market for predicting the future. More accurately, it's a futures market where the underlying commodities are discrete, real-world events. The market bills itself as follows:

The IEM is an online futures market where contract payoffs are based on real-world events such as political outcomes, companies' earnings per share (EPS), and stock price returns.

I, of course, realize that this is very similar to Intrade and other information market sites that offer contracts based on real-world events.  The IEM, however is different in two important ways.  First, it is entirely not for profit; there is no "house", making money on the trading activity, nor any recurring custodial fees, nor any party interested in impeding your withdrawals - the market is run by the University of Iowa as an educational resource of the business school.  And second, most importantly, the IEM is entirely legal in the United States.  The same cannot be said of other online information markets.
Regardless, here's basically how the IEM works using the current US Presidential Election as an example.  The two outcomes for which contracts are issued by the market are:

1. Democratic Victory (in this case, President Obama)
2. Republican Victory (in this case, Governor Romney)

There are precisely the same number of contracts issued for each outcome, and the price for each contract trades between $.00 and $1.00, such that the total value of the two contracts combined is $1.00.  The contracts trade on an open market with the familiar bid/ask market pricing structure.  When the election is over, any contracts held for the winning candidate are redeemable for $1.00, regardless of what they cost, and any contracts held for the losing candidate are redeemable for $0.00000 (repeating, of course).  As of writing, the Democratic contract (Obama victory) is trading at $0.750, and the Republican contract (Romney victory) is trading at $0.250.  So, if you were to today purchase 100 Obama contracts for a total of $75.00, should the president win reelection, on Wednesday your contracts would be worth $1.00 each, or $100.00 total, good for a 33.3333 (repeating, of course) percent return on investment; alternately, if you were to buy 100 Romney contracts, your cost would be only $25, but should the governor win the election, you'd be looking at a 300% ROI.  

(A quick aside, the contract is actually for the winner of the popular vote, rather than the winner of the electoral college and presidency, though the two are not always one and the same, you get the point.) 

The market also allows participants to functionally short contracts by purchasing the same number of each contract (for $1.00 per bundle) and then selling any sub groups of contracts, in essence, betting that the price of the contracts held will go up in value compared to the price of the contracts sold.  Since the two outcomes are mutually exclusive, they have a nearly one-to-one negative correlation.

Source: Iowa Electronic Markets

All that said, the IEM is actually most notable not just for facilitating bets seen to maturity (when investors take delivery of their info-commodity), but for providing a market throughout the election season, thereby becoming something of a barometer for overall sentiment around the race at any given moment.  In fact, historically, the IEM has been shown to be a better predictor of the outcomes of elections than most major polling sources.  The ridiculous graphic on the right (which came directly from the IEM's website) provides an illustration of this fact from the 2008 presidential election.  The price of a specific contract, in essence, represents the market's belief as to the probability of the associated event occurring.  The theory goes that these markets end up being more accurate than polls because when people are forced to vote with their wallets, as much as they may like one candidate or the other, they're still Americans after all, and Americans rarely pass on an opportunity to make some cash.

So, back to the current year, when I say that the Obama contract is trading at $.75 to the Romney contract's $.25, this implies that, as of now, the market is giving Obama a 75% chance of winning the popular vote to Romney's 25%.  Note how much more strongly the market is predicting an Obama victory than are most pollsters.  However, this does not mean the market believes it's going to be a tremendously lopsided victory, in fact, just the opposite, as the IEM also offers a proportional vote contract that pays out based on the relative vote share for the major-party candidates (Republican or Democrat).  That is, if you happen to be holding a Romney contract in this market, and Romney ends up winning, say, 48% of all votes cast either for Romney or Obama, that contract will be worth $.48, while an Obama contract would be worth $.52.  As of writing, the Obama contract is currently sitting at $.505, while the Romney contract is trading at $.492 (an enterprising arbitrageur could take advantage of those totals not summing to $1.00).  

So, the IEM is giving Obama a 75% chance of winning the popular vote, but only edging Romney out by something in the neighborhood of 1% of all votes cast for the two major candidates.  Agree with those sentiments?  If not, I know a place you could potentially make a profit from your contrarian sensibilities.

It's been said that knowledge is power, and for most investors power is money, but in the information markets, interestingly, money is also apparently knowledge.

If you're interested in investing in, or just learning more about the IEM and the presidential markets check out the following (I swear I'm not getting any kickbacks or anything, I'm just a fan):

• Iowa Electronic Markets FAQ
• IEM Presidential Markets Real Time Quotes
• Wikipedia entry on the IEM

NB: Obviously I've chosen to focus on the presidential election in this post, but the IEM offers contracts for all kinds of other events, often around politics, but also concerning miscellaneous goings on in the popular zeitgeist.  All of which are, naturally, very, very interesting.  It's a great market to follow.

China's Taste For Wine

Though not traded on a futures exchange, wine is still, literally anyway, a commodity.  Further, it's a commodity that many people invest in, typically in the form of collectible rare/old wine.  At a party when this ever comes up, usually someone says something like: "over time, rare wine is one of the safest investments when compared to blah blah blah".  There's rarely any data to back this up, but that doesn't matter because it seems believable and it's kind of cool.  Someone should look into that.

But rare wine isn't the order of the day.  No, today I'm interested in exported wine.  Specifically, wine exported to China.  A recent article on GlobalPost.com (which is a publication I had never heard of until two weeks ago) addresses growing wine consumption in China:

Wine bars and boutiques are sprouting across Beijing, and trendy young consumers are flocking to wine-tastings at swish hotels. A dramatic 54 percent rise in wine consumption in China between 2011 and 2015 is predicted, a reflection of the increasing affluence of China’s middle classes, according to a new study by Vinexpo, Asia’s biggest wine exposition.

Let's leave aside for the moment that this study was conducted by a "wine exposition" (whatever that is) and focus on the purported reasoning behind the growth.  Specifically, that the increase in wine consumption is "a reflection of the increasing affluence of China's middle classes."  The article also goes on to say that 40% of Chinese wine imports are from France, specifically.  Plenty of countries make wine; that the increase in imported varietals seems to be focused on French wine implies not just that an increasingly affluent middle class wants to buy wine, rather, that they want to buy good wine.

Curious about how this trend might affect the American wine market, I pulled some numbers from the USDA Website via the FAS USTrade Query system.  First, a look at total wine exports from the US, by country, over the last ten years (note, all volumes reported in Kiloliters):

US Total Wine Exports by Country, 2002 - 2011 (click to enlarge)

The first takeaway?  Whatever amount of American wine the Chinese are importing now or in the next few years is largely insignificant at this point.  We ship so much wine elsewhere that any changes in Chinese demand for US wine are unlikely to be of major concern for the next few years.  That doesn't make it uninteresting, however.  To get a better idea of the changes in China, specifically, let's take a look at the percentage of total US wine exported to four specific countries over that same time frame:

Percent total wine exports to four countries (click to enlarge)

Okay, now we're getting somewhere.  As a percentage of total wines exported, one can see that the amount of wine we ship to China and Hong Kong has been gradually increasing, while that same total for Japan and France hasn't been following any overt pattern.  Now let's compare the raw totals for the three biggest Asian importers of US wine:

Total imports from Japan, China, and Hong Kong (click to enlarge)

Interesting.  The total amount of wine exported to Japan has more or less been hovering around 25,000 kiloliters, while exports to China and Hong Kong have steadily grown.  But remember, the article tells us that the Chinese are developing a taste for French wine, which, accurate or not, has a reputation for being better than most other countries' wines.  The next question, then, is what type of wine is China importing from the US?  When reporting wine export numbers, the USDA breaks out the figures into six categories:

1. Sparkling Wine
2. Effervescent Wine
3. Grape wine of an alcoholic strength not over 14% in containers holding 2L or less.
4. Grape wine of an alcoholic strength not over 14% in containers holding more than 2L.
5. Grape wine of an alcoholic strength of over 14% in containers holding 2L or less.
6. Grape wine of an alcoholic strength of over 14% in containers holding more than 2L.

I don't know, exactly, what the distinction between sparkling wine and effervescent wine is, but types 3 through 6 could generally be thought of as "standard bottled table wine", "standard boxed table wine", "fortified wine" and "holy hell I have a death wish", respectively.

Standard table wine makes up the bulk of exports to all three of these countries, but here's where things get interesting.  Let's look at how export numbers to Japan, China, and Hong Kong compare when caged specifically to standard table wine:

Standard table wine exports to Asia (click to enlarge)

Interestingly, the China and Hong Kong trends for standard bottled table wine follow pretty closely the general trends for ALL wines exported to those countries, while the Japanese trend looks altogether different.  A little stats shows that this is precisely the case.  Who knew the Japanese had such a taste for Night Train? 

• R_squared value comparing total global wine exports to standard table wine exports by country:
• Japan: .1567
• Hong Kong: .9754
• China: .9671

That means that ~97% of Hong Kong and China's change in wine importation from the US over the last ten years can be explained in terms of their importation of wine at 14% alcohol in containers smaller than 2L.  That is, standard table wine. 

The article mentions that the majority of wine consumed in China is produced domestically.  What the change in export number then means, really, is not that China is drinking more wine, per se, but that more people are drinking better wine.   To that end, the article's thesis is entirely correct, but not just for French wine, for all high quality wine.  Until Chinese vineyards begin rivaling the quality and consistency of the best vineyards in France, the United States, and elsewhere, as China's citizenry gains spending power in the global economy, look for this trend to continue.

If you were hoping to come away with an investment idea here, you may be out of luck; there is no grape futures contract in existence, but even if there were, it's unlikely investing in such an instrument would be worthwhile.  Grapes aren't the key here, it's craftsmanship, tradition, and quality.  To that end, investors in rare wine may actually see a boon from the growth of wine exports to China.  If demand for quality keeps up, that rising tide should, in theory anyway, boost the values of all high quality bottles.


Normally I'd say something like "it's a good time to own a vineyard in Napa or Bordeaux", but really there's no need to state a priori truths.

Even Newer Futures Contracts!

Hard Assets Investor just published an article of mine running down the new futures contracts that I had discussed previously (Cobalt, Molybdenum, and Distillers' Dried Grain), as well as the proposed Canadian Oil Futures contract. You can read the full article here.

Nice try US government, we're still not buying natural gas

Two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article with the headline: "Natural-Gas Data Overstated". Apparently, the Energy Department has for some while been screwing up its statistical projection for natural gas and significantly overestimating the country's gas supplies.

Basic economics tells us that when demand stays constant and supply diminishes, prices go up. And according to this report, supplies, in fact, have diminished, albeit somewhat artificially. And how did the market react? It didn't:

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View the full FUTURE:NG00 chart at Wikinvest

Other than that spike the day of the announcement (April 5) natural gas investors apparently couldn't care less about the US Government's overstated inventory figures.

This highlights the fact that in the US we have access to about as much natural gas as we could ever want. Granted, a lot of it is underground, but unless gas stocks were actually low (like, in danger of running out) knowing that our stocks are slightly less than previously thought doesn't actually affect the price. At some point, the functional supply of gas changes from a number of mmBTUs to the categorical figure "plenty". If we got to a point where we were consuming enough natural gas to see stocks diminishing the gas drillers could ramp up production so quickly that no blip would be seen.

So, nice try government, but the market knows better.

Building a Better Gold/Silver Spread

Yes, I realize the blog has been morphing into my simply posting links to articles I am writing for other blogs, but I assure you there's still original content to be had here.

Regardless, here's a new article I wrote for Hard Assets Investor, wherin I devise a multivariate statistical model for the Gold/Silver spread.

The basic idea is that, since gold and the US Dollar are highly correlated, and gold and silver are highly correlated, while silver and the dollar are NOT highly correlated, you can use silver coupled with the USD exchange rate in a multivariate model to observe statistical deviations from historical norms.

The takeaway? Even though past performance does not guarantee of future returns, according to this model at least, gold is trading well above its historical expectation for the current values of silver and the dollar. If you buy into the model, the play would be to short gold, buy silver, and buy a foreign currency with US Dollars.

Diversify by investing in grains

On Monday, Hard Assets Investor published another article of mine, the premise of this one is that it turns out Grains (Corn, Oats, Rice, Soybeans, Wheat) have fundamentally NO correlation with the broader stock market. This makes them an excellent candidate for investors seeking true diversification.

When I say "true" diversification, what I mean is that most investors' idea of diversification is owning lots of different types of stock, and maybe a few bonds. The problem is that stocks (and even bonds, depending on which ones you own) tend to have high co-correlations. That is, if the share price of Coca-Cola suddenly bottoms out, you can bet that a lot of other companies will as well. If interest rates go up at some point ever in the future (I know, ridiculous right?), all other factors being equal, the entire stock market will go down. Lot of good your owning stocks in different industries does you then.

The traditional view has long been that you should own some combination of stocks, bonds, and cash or money-market funds, weighted depending upon your risk tolerance and age. The problem is that with those three categories its nearly impossible to diversify within your risk tolerance. That is, stocks are riskier than bonds are riskier than cash.

That said, commodities provide just as much risk (and upside) as stocks while, as my research demonstrates, offering little to no correlation with the broader market, depending upon which commodities you invest in (i.e. not oil or gold).

You all know my issues with Commodities ETFs, but if you're purely looking for diversification, an ETF that holds a big basket of different grains might be the way to go. Personally though, if you have an account with a futures brokerage I always prefer owning the contracts directly.