The cost of rolling futures contracts, rather than the decline in commodity prices, has been the largest drag on commodity index performance over the past 10 years. Although difficult to implement, asset allocators’ best response may be to develop dynamic execution strategies to mitigate the roll return “tax.” This futures-spot divergence is known as the futures “roll yield,” which we define as the difference in return between a futures contract and its underlying asset.3 The impact of roll yield can be quite significant, in some cases being similar in magnitude to the entire gain or loss an investor experiences on the futures position. Contango (backwardation) implies a loss (gain) on the roll return—assuming a static forward curve in the meantime—because the futures price "chases" the spot price (toward a zone of convergence). Roll return is an important component of commodity futures contracts’ investment performance. Research Affiliates explains in plain language the dynamics of roll returns when the commodity Futures returns consist of two components: the returns of the spot price and the "roll returns". This is kind of obvious if you think about it: suppose the spot price remains constant in time (and therefore has zero return). The roll yield is the yield that a futures investor captures as their long position in a futures contract converges to the spot price; in a backwardated futures market the price rolls up to the spot price, so the roll yield is positive, whereas when the market is in contango the price rolls down to the spot price, so the roll yield is negative. The spot price can stay constant, but the
def futures_rollover_weights(start_date, expiry_dates, contracts, rollover_days=5): """This constructs a pandas DataFrame that contains weights (between 0.0 and 1.0) of contract positions to hold in order to carry out a rollover of rollover_days prior to the expiration of the earliest contract. For fully-funded investors, the optimal choice is a function of futures implied financing and investment time horizon. When the roll cost of futures is sub-ICE LIBOR, investors are unequivocally better served by futures, and if the roll cost is at a premium to ICE LIBOR, the most cost efficient alternative could be either a future or an ETF.
Unlike stocks or spot markets where the instrument can trade in perpetuity, futures contracts have a set rollover or expiration date. “Rollover” refers to the process Roll yield is the amount of return generated in a backwardated futures market achieved by rolling a short-term contract into a longer-term contract and profiting from the convergence toward a
Compare ETFs tracking Horizons EAFE Futures Roll Index Total Return - USD: fact sheets, charts, performances, flows, news, ratings, AuMs, tracking error,
basis of a simple decomposition of futures returns, we show that the return on a To sum up, Table III demonstrates that passive rollover trading strate-. A is correct because when a commodity market is in contango, futures prices are higher than the spot price A. collateral yield, roll yield, and spot price return. 2 Oct 2015 in futures prices close to their maturity (Samuelson 1965), this literature focuses on the effect of single day roll selection on the return series We say that a futures contract is in contango when the price of the futures contracts with later expiry is higher than the contracts which are expiring sooner. 21 Aug 2012 The trades designed to capture the roll returns of commodity futures returned 5, 55% annually (which was 91,9% of the portfolios total return), 11 Sep 2019 The nature of VIX is that it is highly mean-reverting and doesn't trend - this means that roll yield explains most of the long-term returns. The market