Broker-Dealer Risk Appetite and Commodity Returns

This article shows that the risk-bearing capacity of U.S. securities broker-dealers is an important determinant of risk premia in commodity derivatives markets where broker-dealers serve as counterparties to producers and consumers seeking to hedge commodity price risk. I capture the limits of arbitrage that govern these transactions within a simple asset pricing model, which predicts that the price of aggregate commodity risk decreases in the relative leverage of the broker-dealer sector. This prediction receives strong empirical support in the data. Fluctuations in broker-dealer risk-bearing capacity have particularly strong forecasting power for energy returns, both in-sample and out-of-sample.