This book deals with the capability to store surplus commodities and the impact of stockpiles on prices and production.

The field of real options is concerned with the management and financial valuation of operational flexibility in business endeavors. From the very outset, energy and commodity markets -- which play fundamental roles in the worldwide economy -- have provided a relevant context for real option analysis, both in theory and practice. This volume is a collection of six chapters covering recent research on real options in energy and commodity markets, reflecting the significance of these markets for real option analysis. The volume is divided into two parts -- the first on theory and the second on methods and applications. The two chapters in the first part of the book respectively address commodity storage and the concept of convenience yield, and how the management of real options can be impacted by the trader's own market decisions in the context of commodity shipping. The four chapters in the second part of the book propose and apply real option models in various domains -- modeling the evolution of futures prices of emission certificates; managing copper extraction illustrated with an application to a project at Codelco, Chile, the largest copper producer in the world; the core ideas behind real option analysis in the context of the merchant management of hydrocarbon cracking operations; and optimizing the portfolio of contracts that oil refineries use to market their gasoline production.

Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders and policy makers who want to better understand often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminium to oil to soybeans to zinc.

Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and ProductsOver recent decades, the marketplace has seen an increasing integration, not only among different types of commodity markets such as energy, agricultural, and metals, but also with financial markets. This trend raises important questions about how to identify and analyse opportunities in and manage risks of commodity products. The Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and Products offers traders, commodity brokers, and other professionals a practical and comprehensive manual that covers market structure and functioning, as well as the practice of trading across a wide range of commodity markets and products. Written in non-technical language, this important resource includes the information needed to begin to master the complexities of and to operate successfully in today’s challenging and fluctuating commodity marketplace. Designed as a practical practitioner-orientated resource, the book includes a detailed overview of key markets – oil, coal, electricity, emissions, weather, industrial metals, freight, agricultural and foreign exchange – and contains a set of tools for analysing, pricing and managing risk for the individual markets. Market features and the main functioning rules of the markets in question are presented, along with the structure of basic financial products and standardised deals. A range of vital topics such as stochastic and econometric modelling, market structure analysis, contract engineering, as well as risk assessment and management are presented and discussed in detail with illustrative examples to commodity markets. The authors showcase how to structure and manage both simple and more complex multi-commodity deals. Addressing the issues of profit-making and risk management, the book reveals how to exploit pay-off profiles and trading strategies on a diversified set of commodity prices. In addition, the book explores how to price energy products and other commodities belonging to markets segmented across specific structural features. The Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and Products includes a wealth of proven methods and useful models that can be selected and developed in order to make appropriate estimations of the future evolution of prices and appropriate valuations of products. The authors additionally explore market risk issues and what measures of risk should be adopted for the purpose of accurately assessing exposure from multi-commodity portfolios. This vital resource offers the models, tools, strategies and general information commodity brokers and other professionals need to succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace.

"The World Scientific Handbook of Futures Markets serves as a definitive source for comprehensive and accessible information in futures markets. The emphasis is on the unique characteristics of futures markets that make them worthy of a special volume. In our judgment, futures markets are currently undergoing remarkable changes as trading is shifting from open outcry to electronic and as the traditional functions of hedging and speculation are extended to include futures as an alternative investment vehicle in traditional portfolios. The unique feature of this volume is the selection of five classic papers that lay the foundations of the futures markets and the invitation to the leading academics who do work in the area to write critical surveys in a dozen important topics."--$cProvided by publisher.

For many academics, students, and professionals, the field of commodities is a black box. This book explores commodities in a holistic manner, presenting concepts from a multidisciplinary business and financial perspective, and offering a panoramic view of the global commodity business and markets. In this book, the author presents core issues related to global commodities with recent data including COVID-19. The book introduces the key physical commodities traded globally and some related issues such as the global supply chain, global trading, transportation, storage, and how to finance global commodity trades. Then, it discusses how global commodity businesses and traders manage global risks related to commodity production (generation or extraction), transportation, storage, the final delivery, and currency exchange. Additionally, the book discusses financial commodities, the origins of global commodity derivatives and exchanges, the rationale behind the birth of commodity futures and trading, hedging, speculation, financialization, and manipulation of commodity markets, and how financial trading is executed in real life. In the last section, the author also discusses sustainability issues related to global commodities and the financial valuation aspects of the global commodity businesses supported by examples from real cases with recent data.

The recent global financial crisis exposed the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models. Not only did macro models fail to predict the crisis, they seemed incapable of explaining what was happening to the economy. Policymakers felt abandoned by the conventional tools of the now obsolete Washington consensus and the World Trade Organization’s oversimplified faith in free markets.The traditional models for agricultural commodities have so far failed to take into account the uncertain character of the global agricultural economy and its ferocious consequences in food price volatility, the worst in 300 years, yielding hunger riots throughout the world. This book explores the elements which could help to close this fundamental modeling gap. To what extent should traditional models be questioned regarding agricultural commodities? Are prices on these markets foreseeable? Can their evolution be either predicted or convincingly simulated, and if so, by which methods and models? Presenting contributions from acknowledged experts from several countries and backgrounds – professors at major international universities or researchers within specialized international organizations – the book concentrates on four issues: the role of expectations and capacity of prediction; policy issues related to development strategies and food security; the role of hoarding and speculation and finally, global modeling methods. The book offers a renewed wisdom on some of the core issues in the world economy today and puts forward important innovations in analyzing these core issues, among which the modular modeling design, the Momagri model being a seminal example of it. Reading this book should inspire fruitful revisions in policy-making to improve the welfare of populations worldwide.