By Dwight Cass
Reports of commodity vols death have been greatly exaggerated.
After the whipsawing commodity volatility that prevailed since before the financial crisis, treasurers had a few welcome, quiet months early this year. At the time, Goldman Sachs analysts noted that the commodity markets were less volatile than any other asset class—a phenomenon more or less unheard of since 2006. But now that stumbling developing and frontier economies and other factors have pushed commodity volatility and the cost of hedging up, what can hedgers expect?
The drop in overall commodity market vol was nothing to sneeze at. Returns last year on indices linked to commodity volatility came in at ten-year lows. Softs, metals and energy components returned 3.43 percent in 2012, according to the CEMP Commodity Volatility Weighted Index, down from a high of 27.30 percent in 2009. It was negative by about 7 percent through May of this year. The Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index returned 1.06 percent.
The behavior of the commodity futures markets adds to this rosy glow—investors and hedgers rolling their positions forward currently benefit from positive carry in many markets.
But then along came April 15, when gold futures suffered their biggest one-day drop since the 1980s. The plunge could not be explained by exceptionally good macro data or a decrease in economic or political uncertainty, although both factors have been improving. Nor can the Fed’s murmurs about cutting its loose money program, which should weigh on gold prices, since it would reduce the risk of inflation. The trillions the Fed has already pumped into the markets and its zero interest rate policy has kept the threat of inflation sufficiently daunting to make the sharp fall in gold’s price puzzling. The conventional view is that rising rates, signaled by the Fed’s “tapering” talk, will hurt the bullion markets.
The second quarter was gold’s worst on record, but other commodities began faltering, too. Brent oil fell the most in 15 years (Egypt’s instability has pushed it up again) and copper dropped sharply. In June, investors pulled $2.4bn out of commodity ETFs, for a year-to-date total of $21.3bn, behind equities and fixed income, but not by much.
Epiphenomenon
Originally, the gold crash was thought to have no effect on the broader commodity hedging markets. Rather, most saw it as a retreat from historic highs that were not justified by demand, Glenn Beck’s best efforts notwithstanding, in a market that dances to its own tune.
Gold has behaved in a counterintuitive way many times before. Just one year ago, when Ben Bernanke said QE2 was at an end, gold prices hit a record high. Commentators and analysts nearly broke their pencils trying to generate a coherent narrative for why this should be. Most prattled that gold bugs thought the Fed’s move would not be sufficient to head off inflation. Gold hit another all-time high in September, again turning conventional market causality on its head by doing so on the day of a poor jobs report.
There is a school of thought among technical commodities analysts that gold’s (and silver’s) behavior is nothing more than normal, range-bound trading. They note that the hoopla over all time highs is misguided because on a CPI-adjusted basis, gold and silver were never really near their highs. Gold hit its inflation-adjusted high around $2300 per ounce, and silver, its $130 high, in 1980.
Meat and potatoes
But the upswing in vol in the broader commodity markets suggests that gold and silver can no longer be ignored. Goldman Sachs commodity analyst Jeffrey Currie issued a note in mid-January arguing that he had “sympathy” for the idea of a long-term structural decline in commodity vol, but the current drop is “too much too soon, both relative to commodity market fundamentals as well as other asset classes.” Rather, Goldman argues that positive carry is the independent variable with the most explanatory power. That is no longer the case.
That’s because “the price movements around these new stable ‘equilibrium’ price levels are driven by short-term demand fundamentals with emerging market demand the key driver in the current environment,” Mr. Currie wrote. “Despite concerns over ‘the end’ of strong commodity demand from the emerging markets, recent micro- and macroeconomic data from China point to continued strong demand.” In this case, investors are hedging against oversupply in the future.
But as FT Alphaville’s Izabella Kaminska noted when discussing the Goldman report in mid-January, the zero interest rate environment affects the way one can interpret positive carry. If a producer were to destock to take advantage of backwardation, it would be left with a pile of cash, which would be eroded by negative carry due to ZIRP. Hence the incentive to take advantage of backwardation—and thereby bring the market back into better balance—is not as clear cut as it would be if money yields were positive.
a step ahead
Recent data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission suggests that corporate hedgers are already ahead of the game, and usually are. Parsed by financial investment firm Epsilon, “when commercial hedgers begin leaving the party, the price of the metal falls shortly after.” While this shows some prescience on the part of corporate treasurers and procurement executives, it also indicates some degree of substitution effect, less comprehensive risk management or possibly the ramping down of production when hedging becomes too expensive. If Epsilon’s analysis is correct, corporate treasurers beat so-called smart money in exiting unnecessary gold hedges this year. They may find it harder to protect themselves from the decline in other, more crucial, assets.