Trend following, risk parity and momentum in commodity futures

Andrew Clare, James Seaton, Peter Smith and Stephen Thomas

International Review of Financial Analysis, 2014, vol. 31, issue C, 1-12

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: G12 G13 G15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Working Paper: Trend Following, Risk Parity and Momentum in Commodity Futures (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finana:v:31:y:2014:i:c:p:1-12

DOI: 10.1016/j.irfa.2013.10.001

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