Portfolio Diversification with Commodities : From a Swedish Perspective

Abstract: This paper investigates the diversification characteristics of commodities in relation to the Swedish equity index OMXSPI. Much of the previous literature concludes that gold and oil possess diversification or hedging properties against the US equity markets. The findings from literature investigating other markets or commodities are less conclusive. We apply a DCC-GARCH model on monthly data between 1996 and 2022 and analyze the dynamic conditional correlations between eight commodities, Swedish inflation and OMXSPI. We focus our analysis on three well-known crises and find large variations in the correlation among the assets and between the different crises. We also construct three portfolios, a minimum variance-, maximum Sharpe- and equally weighted portfolio, to investigate if commodities lower the variance of a portfolio based on OMXSPI. We find that aluminum, cocoa, silver and soybeans display diversification characteristics while copper, platinum and rubber are deemed less capable diversifiers. The model returned no significant results between the commodities and inflation. We conclude this could be because of the stable nature of Sweden’s inflation or the low contribution commodities seem to have to the GDP.