An Empirical Study on Price and Return of Commodity ETFs in Korea

Abstract

This study analyses empirically the Granger causality between commodity ETFs listed in KRX (Korea Stock Exchange) and the price determinants of the underlying commodities as well as the KOSPI200 index and the underlying indices, and compares the performance of four commodity ETFs : gold futures, oil futures, soybean futures and the copper price. The main findings are as follows : First, the commodity ETFs tracking gold futures, oil futures and soybean futures prices in the sample from the inception to June 2015 were not directly related to the price determinants of the underlying commodities except for the copper ETF which was affected by the oil price as one of the price determinants of copper. In addition, all four ETFs were not related to the KOSPI200 index while they were affected by the underlying indices. Second, the soybean futures ETF outperformed the KOSPI200 index in terms of the cumulative returns and the oil futures ETF recorded the worst performance in terms of the cumulative returns and IR (information ratio). Third, the average tracking error of each ETF except for the oil futures ETF showed a positive value and the price of each ETF except for the soybean futures ETF has been undervalued compared to its net asset value. From the above findings, we can infer that investors in the copper ETF should closely watch the movement of the oil price to enhance the return and investors in the commodity ETFs should first consider agriculture-related ETFs rather than oil-related ETFs considering the price volatility. In addition, the inverse ETFs for copper and agriculture-related products should be introduced following the oil and gold futures inverse ETFs to protect against negative returns in a declining period of commodity prices.