The Impact of Fundamentals on Volatility Measures of Agricultural Substitutes

Abstract

This study builds upon the existing literature on the Working curve and backwardation to explore the impact of storage regimes on the volatility measures of substitute agricultural commodity markets. We investigate the impact of commodity fundamentals (storage regime and stocks-to-use ratio), commodity-specific financial variables (options hedging pressure-long and -short), world economic activity, market-wide volatility index, seasonality, and time-to-maturity on nearby and deferred implied volatility (IV) series of selected commodity pairs of corn-soybean and winter wheat-spring wheat. Our work confirms that, in some cases, grain and oilseed IV derived from options premia respond to shocks in commodity (and substitute commodity) fundamentals which are in line with the behaviour of volatility in futures markets. Own-storage regime effects on price variability are stronger in the selected markets, while spillover effects from substitute commodity storage regimes show a modest impact on volatilities. We also find some evidence for the stocks-to-use ratio of both corn and soybean to impact both their own and each other’s IV, while options hedging pressure has some impact only on wheat IVs.