Commodities stumble, but still on track for first yearly gain since 2010
by Myra P. Saefong / MarketWatch / 1 OCT 2016
Lean hogs, soybeans and crude oil all lost ground in the third quarter, but the commodities market held its grip on the first yearly gain since 2010.
Commodities typically underperform in the third quarter, but they logged their strongest third quarter since 2013, analysts at Citi Research said in a recent note.
The Bloomberg Commodity Index is down nearly 4% for the quarter, but remains up about 8.6% year to date. The index hasn’t posted a calendar-year gain since 2010, when the index saw a nearly 17% climb. It lost almost 25% in 2015, but gained nearly 13% in the second quarter of this year.
It was “not a hot summer for commodities, but the winter is unlikely to be as cold to investors,” Citi analysts said.
For the quarter ended Sept. 30, the largest commodity gainers included palladium, up nearly 21% according to FactSet data, and cotton , up roughly 6%. On the downside, lean hogs , down a whopping 47%, and soybeans , off 17%, suffered the biggest losses.