I’m starting a chapter-by-chapter walkthrough of Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies, edited by H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, and Jeffrey H. Harris (Oxford University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780190656010). This is not a textbook summary. It’s my honest take on what each chapter says and whether it actually helps someone trying to understand commodity markets.
Chapter 1 of Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies is the road map. Baker, Filbeck, and Harris lay out what the full book covers and why commodities still belong in the conversation about portfolio construction. It’s the kind of chapter you skim before deciding which later sections to read first.
Florian Ielpo’s Chapter 2 is the economics backbone of the book. If you’ve ever wondered why your commodity fund lost money when spot oil went up, or why backwardation matters for futures returns, this chapter explains it. Ielpo uses oil, copper, gold, and corn as stand-ins for energy, industrial metals, precious metals, and agriculture.
Jerry Markham’s Chapter 3 is a legal history of U.S. commodity market regulation. It reads like a timeline of Congress trying to catch up with markets that move faster than legislation. If you’ve ever wondered what a futures commission merchant actually does, or why customer funds in an FCM bankruptcy are not FDIC-insured, this chapter answers it.
Chapter 4 asks a question that sounds obvious until you think about it: do professional commodity traders make the same psychological mistakes as retail stock investors? Nofsinger, Chatjuthamard, and Dai survey the behavioral finance literature applied to futures markets. The answer is mostly yes, but with nuance.
Neil Schofield’s Chapter 5 is the practical companion to Ielpo’s economics chapter. Where Chapter 2 explains why futures curves slope up or down, Chapter 5 shows how investors actually build products around those curves. Schofield focuses on investment applications, not pricing math.
Michael Haigh’s Chapter 6 is the most data-heavy chapter in Part One. Haigh, a Societe Generale managing director, uses principal component analysis (PCA) to answer two questions investors actually care about: When are commodity prices driven by real supply and demand versus macro financial factors? And for oil specifically, is the move about supply or demand?
Chapter 7 shifts from financial products to the physical stuff. Devos, Eng-Ong, and Spieler explain why commodities are not just another ticker symbol. Wheat rots. Oil needs tankers. Copper grades vary. That physical reality shapes prices, hedging strategies, and who can actually play in these markets.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 8 opens the agricultural section of the book, and it starts with a fact that surprised me: agriculture is tiny as a share of GDP in rich countries (about 1.3% in the U.S.) but massive in frontier economies, where it can be 40% or more of national output. Sierra Leone, Chad, Ethiopia. The U.S. still runs a trade surplus in farm goods, exporting billions more than it imports each year. So the sector matters globally even when it looks small on a developed-country balance sheet.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
The second half of Chapter 8 is basically a tour of the twelve biggest ag products traded on futures exchanges. Moran and Syvrud group them into grains and oilseeds, dairy, and softs (livestock gets its own chapter later). Here is what stood out to me product by product.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
Penick and Riggs (CFTC economists, writing in personal capacity) tackle energy in Chapter 9. Their angle is market structure and regulation, not “buy oil here.” That makes it dense but useful if you trade or follow energy derivatives.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 10 is where agriculture meets the feedlot. Deng, Spieler, and Tsang walk you from calf on the range to boxed beef, then through the futures market that lets ranchers and packers hedge along the way. If you only know “cattle futures exist,” this chapter fills in the production chain that makes those contracts make sense.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
Leonard and O’Neill (Cornerstone Research) pack a lot into Chapter 11. Metals trade like other commodities on futures and OTC, but mine lead times (25+ years exploration to production), joint outputs from single deposits, and scrap as a major supply source give the sector its own rhythm. They also track how China’s rise moved price discovery toward Chinese exchanges, especially in ferrous markets.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
Part Three of the book shifts from physical markets to how you invest. Chapter 12, by Simsek and Kiymaz, is about managed futures and the CTAs (commodity trading advisors) who run them. Fair warning: the name is outdated. Most CTAs today trade financial futures too, not just corn and crude.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
Milliken, Nikbakht, and Spieler tackle exchange-traded commodity products in Chapter 13. Since SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) in November 2004 and iShares Gold Trust (IAU) in January 2005, the wrapper exploded: 140+ funds, ~$80B AUM by 2016. But the legal structure you buy matters as much as the ticker.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies | Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris | ISBN: 9780190656010
Camilo, Cizel, and Zurek close Part Three with commodity mutual funds (CMFs). If ETFs are the trendy wrapper, mutual funds are the old guard: buy/redeem at end-of-day NAV, mostly active management, heavy equity holdings in mining and energy companies. This chapter uses CRSP mutual fund data (1996-2016, 207 funds) to ask whether CMFs deliver commodity exposure, diversification, and alpha.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 15 is where the math shows up, but Timothy Krause keeps it readable. The core idea is simple: futures prices are tied to spot prices through no-arbitrage rules. If the link breaks, someone with enough capital will trade until it snaps back.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Dianna Preece tackles a question every commodities investor eventually asks: what are you actually earning, and is it worth the headache? The answer is more complicated than a single headline return number.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Aaron Filbeck asks a question most investors skip: when you benchmark commodity performance, what exactly are you measuring? His answer: probably not what you think.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
After 2008, everyone wanted to know if a shock in oil would spread to corn, copper, or gold. Frankie Chau and Rataporn Deesomsak build a tool to measure exactly that: the Commodity Volatility Spillover Index (CVSI).
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Kamal Smimou asks a practical question: if you trade emerging markets, do U.S.-listed commodity futures tell you anything useful? His answer, backed by panel regressions across 22 countries, is yes. But the link depends on which commodity and which region.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Hilary Till, Joseph Eagleeye, and Richard Heckinger write from the trenches. This chapter is less theory, more “here is what traders actually do, how they blow up, and what you should not copy.”
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Claudio Boido writes for asset managers asking a hard question in 2016: does the old commodities allocation playbook still work? Spoiler: the pitch changed, but commodities are not dead. The approach just needs to evolve.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Donald Larson opens with a tension policymakers have wrestled with for over a century. High food prices hurt the poor. Low and volatile prices hurt commodity-exporting countries. This first half of Chapter 22 maps what actually happened to food prices since 1900, and why volatility matters more than most investors realize.
Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Gregory Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
The second half of Donald Larson’s chapter shifts from diagnosis to response. If Malthus and Hotelling were right about scarcity, food should be wildly expensive by now. It is not. Here is why, what governments tried, and what might actually help small farmers handle risk.
Book: Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 23: High Frequency Trading of Commodities (Raymond P. H. Fishe & Aaron D. Smith)
Book: Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 24: Energy Risk Management (Thomas Barkley, Mingwei Liang & Andrew C. Spieler)
Book: Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 25: Financialization of Commodity Markets (Kyle J. Putnam & Ramesh Adhikari)
Book: Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 26: Virtual Currencies as Commodities (Lamia Chourou, Samir Saadi & Azizah Aljohani)
Book: Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 27: Research Issues in Commodities and Commodity Derivatives (Scott Mixon)
Book: Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
Chapter 28: Future of Commodity Markets and Investments (Hunter M. Holzhauer)
Book: Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies
Editors: H. Kent Baker, Greg Filbeck, Jeffrey H. Harris
ISBN: 9780190656010
That wraps the series. Twenty-eight chapters, dozens of authors, one massive Oxford University Press volume from 2018. We started with commodity market basics and ended with Holzhauer’s look at where trading is headed. In between: performance data, strategy frameworks, food policy, HFT, energy risk, financialization fights, Bitcoin, open research questions, and bank exits from physical commodities.