Trend Following, Risk Parity and Momentum in Commodity Futures

Andrew Clare, James Seaton, Peter Smith and Stephen Thomas

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: We show that combining momentum and trend following strategies for individual commodity futures can lead to portfolios which offer attractive risk adjusted returns which are superior to simple momentum strategies; when we expose these returns to a wide array of sources of systematic risk we find that robust alpha survives. Experimenting with risk parity portfolio weightings has limited impact on our results though in particular is beneficial to long-short strategies; the marginal impact of applying trend following methods far outweighs momentum and risk parity adjustments in terms of risk-adjusted returns and limiting downside risk.Overall this leads to an attractive strategy for investing in commodity futures and emphasises the importance of trend following as an investment strategy in the commodity futures context.

Keywords: trend following; momentum; risk parity; equally-weighted; portfolios; commodity futures. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G10 G11 G12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-rmg
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Trend following, risk parity and momentum in commodity futures (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yor:yorken:12/28

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