Benjamin Hoff – Commodity Futures Surfaces and the Cash-and-Carry Glue (S7E17)
My guest this episode is Benjamin Hoff, Global Head of Commodity Strategy and Research at Société Générale. Ben started his career in rates before making the jump to commodities, and that lens—shaped by curve arbitrage, convexity, and carry—colors everything he does. In this conversation, we explore how commodities differ fundamentally from other asset classes: the importance of cash-and-carry economics, the sparse information cadence that rewards technical models, and the physical realities that challenge purely quantitative approaches. We also dive into Ben’s more recent work on the geometry of the futures surface, how convexity and skewness may be misunderstood, and why tools like Lévy area might help uncover non-linear structure in the data. Whether you’re deep in the weeds of term structure trading or just curious about how to systematize chaos in barrels and bushels, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.
Key Points
- Commodities fundamentally differ from other asset classes due to their reliance on cash and carry economics, where the availability of storage and credit significantly influences term structure pricing.
- Sparse fundamental news flow in commodities makes technical models particularly effective, as systematic traders can leverage price as the equilibrator for disparate and non-uniform information sources like weather data and satellite imagery.
- Advanced mathematical concepts like rough path theory and the Levy area metric are opening new frontiers in commodity trading by providing more precise measurements of lead-lag relationships and enabling higher-frequency, cross-sectional analysis.
Chapters
| 0:00 | |
| 2:02 | |
| 4:27 | |
| 11:05 | |
| 18:17 | |
| 20:40 | |
| 29:58 | |
| 34:09 | |
| 37:19 | |
| 39:54 | |
| 48:21 | |
| 51:00 | |
| 1:00:23 | |
| 1:04:27 | |
| 1:07:20 | |
| 1:09:00 |
Transcript
Loading transcript...