Commodities vs. Commodity Stocks

Trading commodities is not the same thing as trading commodity stocks. Commodity stocks, especially in partially-open economies like India, have their own cadence.

Take aluminum, for example. If you compare the MCX Aluminum Index with National Aluminum stock, the stock has vastly outperformed the metal.

While there is something to be said about the stock being more volatile than the metal, the difference is returns is night-and-day.

Stocks are evaluated on the basis of free-cashflow, earnings growth, return on capital, etc. While the prices of metals if mostly determined by short-term demand-supply imbalances.

Generally, Indian metal stocks have vastly outperformed the metals themselves.

If the government has erected tariff barriers to protect certain domestic industries, it makes no sense to try and link commodity prices to producer prices. Going back to our example, there is zero correlation between the monthly returns of aluminum vs. the monthly excess returns of National Aluminum (over the NIFTY 50 TR index) on any time frame.

Trading metals is completely different from trading metal stocks.

Code and charts on github.