After the 2008 financial crisis, many investors diversified their portfolios with different commodities, including the so-called softs. This paper aims to answer the question of whether individual investors can benefit from technical analysis on soft commodity markets. The empirical study is based on daily quotations of six soft commodities: coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton, rubber and frozen concentrated orange juice from 2010 to 2018, and investigates the profitability of applying indicators and oscillators based on moving averages with different length. The results show that the application of five-day simple and weighted moving averages and momentum oscillators was most effective, providing positive returns in five out of six soft commodities markets.
Estimation of LD50 by moving averages
