The pricing efficiency of exchange-traded commodities

Exchange-traded commodities (ETCs) open the commodity markets to both private and institutional investors. This paper is the first to examine the pricing efficiency and potential determinants of price deviations of this new class of derivatives based on daily data of 237 ETCs traded on the German market from 2006 to 2012. Given the unique size of the sample, we employ the premium/discount analysis, quadratic and linear pricing methods, as well as regression models. We find that the ETCs incur, on average, price deviations in their daily trading and are more likely to trade at a premium from their net asset values than at a discount. In addition, we examine the influence of certain factors such as management fees, commodity sectors, issuers, spread, assets under management, investment strategies, replication and collateralization methods on quadratic and linear price deviations.