| The holy grail of portfolio diversification: an asset class that provides long-term risk-adjusted returns similar to equities but is negatively correlated with the returns of stocks and bonds. That is what professors Gary Gorton and Geert Rouwenhorst (hereafter G&R) appeared to have identified in their seminal study, “Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures”.
The paper looked at the period from July 1959 through December 2004 and concluded that the risk premium earned from investing in a broadly diversified basket of fully collateralized commodity futures is very similar to the historical equity risk premium. Moreover, the authors found that the volatility of commodity futures (as measured by standard deviation) was less than that of stocks...............................................Full Article: Source
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