Natural resources also offer risks and returns

Article Excerpt

Physical commodities and publicly listed producers of commodities have delivered steady returns over time when compared to the overall stock market. However, this comes at the cost of more volatility. Commodities have many sub-categories each with their own dynamics. Here’s a look at the performance of several sub-groups: Steady long-term returns, but more volatility Over the 20 years since 2003, an investment in a basket of physical commodities delivered a return of 4.6% per year—while a broad index of commodity producers delivered 8.7% per year. That’s in line with the performance of the MSCI All Country Index (see table below). Commodities, or their listed producers, are more volatile than the broader equity markets—in fact, the volatility of the monthly price changes of commodity producers is about a third higher than the broader market. However, the maximum losses experienced by the publicly listed commodity producers since 2003 was slightly less than that for the broad equity market. Here’s further explanation of the table, and the indexes used…