Book Review: Hedging Commodities by Slobodan Jovanovic

Nowadays, many providers of asset-valuation software sell more than thirty different financial models, employing more than one hundred different derivative securities intended to prevent damage from market disasters and enable companies to gain control over future returns.

Yet, firms, as well as whole industry sectors, frequently face severe financial troubles and bankruptcies as markets continue to behave unpredictable and erratically.

In order to sustain a competitive advantage in today?s precarious market environment, risk managers must be adaptive to various risk challenges. This implies a keen awareness of risk exposure and proper managerial oversight to react quickly, configure a hedge portfolio, monitor performance and preserve value.

The focus of Hedging Commodities: A practical guide to hedging strategies with futures and options is on commodity exchanges and in particular on base metals and gold. It is a hub of graphically treated hedging strategies an invaluable resource of hedging case studies and examples.

The straightforward and up-to-date examination cover all aspects of hedging techniques vis-a-vis some of the most widely traded metal contracts?gold and copper within the context of major commodity exchanges?LME and CBOT.

When it comes to hedge strategies specifically, a great effort has been employed in creating new instruments and concepts that will prove to be superior to classic narrative methods and interpretations.

Consequently, Hedging Commodities succeeded in delivering a recognizable structure of breakthrough graphic depictions designed in order to achieve that ultimate goal?to assist business and risk managing teams proper mechanisms in modeling and mapping hedge strategies solutions.

Core Objectives

This book tackles major issues related to financial-risk management challenging the conventional narrative discourse, believing that graphical presentation, handled expertly, can often communicate with greater efficiency and richer meaning than text alone.

Rather than providing isolated aspects of risk management, the author managed to capture an integrated corpus of inter-related conceptions allowing the investors to compare numerous avenues of handling risk exposure and better adapt to ever changing market occurrences.

It?s most pronounced objective is aimed to elucidate the sequence of transactions that constitute hedging strategy and to make it more transparent. Accordingly, every strategy, every conception is elaborated in multiple ways?by means of four different methods: graphically, algebraically, symbolically and numerically.

The book is easy to follow providing very simplified and clear examples of how to identify physical risk exposure and implement hedging concepts and strategies in various market circumstances.