To: carranza2 who wrote (91313 ) 9/30/2007 1:48:42 PM From: Wyätt Gwyön Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 206126 c2, to clarify, the "equities" i was referring to in my previous post ("just because commodities outperformed the equities this year doesn't mean they will next year") are the equities producing the underlying commodities, not ALL equities. i mean, if crude outperformed crude equities by a huge amount this year, i would not be surprised if the crude equities play catchup next year. that's what i meant when i said i think Coxe is chasing past performance a bit, by wanting to switch to commodities themselves from the commodity equities (though he also hedges a bit, since he says he doesn't suggest selling commodity equities). if you look at the period from 1970s through early 2000s, commodities were an excellent diversifier from equities. a 50/50 split of SPX and GSCI provided superior returns to 100% allocation to either, with lower volatility. better returns with lower risk, now that sounds like a plan! there is an excellent study of this in Gibson's Asset Allocation , and Bill Bernstein's site also has some good articles (efficientfrontier.com). problem now is so many institutions have gotten religion over commodities, there is now a lot of leveraged money in them and the negative covariance vs. equities has started to disappear. there is a real risk that they will not be such good diversifiers. my pet theory is that cheap currencies (mainly JPY) are being borrowed in soize to go long "stuff". an unwinding of this trade could hurt commodities and most risk assets, while benefitting mainly JPY (is my theory). so i like JPY as low-beta equity hedge more than "stuff", especially since my equities are al most all "stuff stocks".think the S&P is going to tank next year for reasons we all know. At the same time, increased global demand for commodities, particularly US ag products, will continue unabated. i profess ignorance over short time periods (too much noise), but over longer periods i think you are right. thing is, over longer periods commodity stocks will probably act more like the underlying commodities than the stock market. for people who are already hugely overweight commodity stocks, i don't think commodities will provide much diversification.