Stats › Long run returns › Commodities
Commodity futures returned 4.49% a year, stocks 7.35%
The commodity index trailed equities by 286 basis points a year on higher volatility. An equally weighted basket of individual commodities did far worse still. Source: Erb and Harvey, NBER working paper 11222.
A commodity index holds futures contracts, not the goods themselves, so it rolls each contract forward every month. From 1982 to 2004 it returned under five percent a year against over seven for US shares. The case for commodities was diversification, never return.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 8 sections, 2 charts and 5 named sources, roughly 1050 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.