A Look at How Stocks Correlate to Commodities

This chart reflects correlations between stock returns (7,075 tickers) and commodity returns (76 types) for the 5 year period between 4/2012 and 3/2017. The data was pulled and calculated in Python – monthly commodity prices and daily stock prices that were converted to monthly averages. Because of differences in timing on when stocks IPO’d (more recently vs. having a full 5 years of history), or commodity prices that weren’t available in certain time frames, there may be some missing or inconclusive values.  If a user is interested in looking further into a correlation, I would suggest checking that ticker against an ETF of the commodity on Google Finance. The first column is an average correlation calculation if the user wants a quick idea of what companies are inversely (negative values), most (positive values), or not affected (closer to 0), in general, by commodity pricing. Stock values originate from Yahoo Finance and commodity pricing comes from the LME, CME, ODA, ICE, and World Bank. This chart is not meant as investment advice, but rather an interesting look at how companies trend with commodities.

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