Long‐short speculator sentiment in agricultural commodity markets
研究12种农产品期货中多空投机者情绪能否带来短期收益，发现情绪期收益显著为正，且存在短期时间序列动量效应，表明投机者拥有无法通过滞后观察复制的独家信息。
Abstract This paper tests the hypothesis that long‐short speculators are able to generate short‐term investment returns based on their sentiment for 12 agricultural commodity futures. For this purpose, we dynamically model the equidirectional trading of long and short commodity futures of long‐short speculators as a proxy for their market sentiment. We find evidence that the sentiment period returns are considerably positive and differ significantly from neutral sentiment periods for all commodities, which underlines the sentiment's relevance. In line with the empirical literature, we can reject the argument of price manipulation as the price continues to develop into the direction of the sentiment period although long‐short speculators trade non‐directionally in the following. We rather indicate the existence of a short‐term time‐series momentum effect, which can be robustly identified without the requirement to define an external model parameter. From the superior sentiment‐based momentum returns, we conclude that long‐short speculators have valuable, exclusive information, which cannot be replicated by observing their trading activity with a time lag of eight trading days. We also find that a sentiment‐based momentum strategy generates significantly higher returns than the long‐short speculators have realised in the 15‐year sample period which we attribute to the complexity of the long‐short speculators' investment strategies.