Commodity ETF Tracking Yale Professors’ Index to Start Trading

The United States Commodity Index Fund, an exchange-traded fund tied to an index designed in part by two Yale University professors whose research earlier this decade helped spur a commodities rush, begins trading today.

The index was created by SummerHaven Index Management LLC, based in Stamford, Connecticut, with the help of K. Geert Rouwenhorst, whose 2004 paper with colleague Gary Gorton, titled “Facts and Fantasies About Commodity Futures,” argued that an investment in a broad commodity index would have brought positive returns from 1959 to 2004. Both are professors of finance at the Yale School of Management.