Stats › Long run returns › Commodities

Commodities against stocks

Long run/commodities · 1982 to 2026 · Erb and Harvey, EIA, S&P DJI · 5 sources · data as of 1 Aug 2026

Commodities get sold as the thing that works when everything else doesn't. Real stuff, oil and copper and wheat, an asset that isn't a share certificate and supposedly protects you when prices are rising. It's an appealing story and it isn't quite what the record says.

This page is the long run evidence, plus the two details that trip almost everyone up. The first is that a commodity index and a commodity price are different animals, because an index holds futures contracts it has to keep rolling forward, and that rolling costs money whether or not the price of the underlying goes anywhere. The second is what actually happened on the day oil went negative, which was much narrower and much more specific than the way it usually gets told. There's also a look at energy shares, because owning oil companies is not the same as owning oil, and 2026 makes that point better than any argument could.

I built this one because commodities are where the gap between the pitch and the arithmetic is widest, and the arithmetic isn't hard once someone shows you where to look. Five sources, all named and dated underneath, and the notes at the bottom flag where two government agencies disagree by a cent and where a widely quoted figure has no traceable origin at all. Read those notes. They're the honest part.