Customer Reviews

The Handbook of Commodity Investing (Frank J. Fabozzi Series)

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If you need to get up to speed on the academic research into commodities, this book is a useful place to start. It's dated 2008, but few of the studies reflect data or analysis after 2006. Don't expect any insight into the markets in or after the 2008 crash.

As is normal for a collection of this type, each chapter reflects a different team of authors, and certain topics are covered repeatedly. A reader who tries to work through this entire collection will find the term "roll return" or "roll yield" defined over and over again. Different readers will have different interests, and I can't predict which chapters will be of interest to others, but I found chapter 18 "Sources of Alpha in Commodity Investing" by Markus Mezger to be particularly interesting. I found only one or two chapters to be totally worthless (a trivial discussion of risk management in chapter 12 for example, and a chapter on the securitization of commodity price risk).

About 2/3 of the book involves indices and CTAs. The last section reviews individual commodities -- gold, then sugar, then copper, etc.

The book contains one misogynistic joke that should have been edited out, in chapter 16, p.392.

This is a compilation of other people's studies mushed together in 1000 pages of boring math and footnotes galore.

The Handbook of Commodity Investing (Frank J. Fabozzi Series) (Purchased on 10/29/2008)
by PhD, CFA, CPA Frank J. Fabozzi