Commodities for the long run? The latest Global Investment Returns Yearbook from the London Business School academics Dimson, Marsh and Staunton, out this week, has some important insights into the behaviour of commodities as an asset class, which, they point out, have some potentially invaluable diversification and inflation-hedging properties. Here are some of their conclusions on this topic, based on their extensive historical data set which stretches back to the nineteenth century:

Individual physical/spot commodities have provided low long-run returns since 1900 with an average annuali...