Commodity fund landed in Japan in 1988. It was a time when the Japanese economy was in a bubble. Commodity fund, that suddenly came into the spotlight because it was a financial product made a high profit during Black Monday in the U.S., developed from an engineering method and then increased its theoretical accuracy. After it landed in Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation and ORIX Corporation sold their commodity funds incorporating zero-coupon bonds respectively and then commodity funds of the same scheme by Marubeni Corporation, Nissho Iwai Corporation, Sumisho Lease Co., Ltd., etc. were sold. For example, ORIX fund, “ORIX Futures Fund Ⅰ”and “ORIX Futures Fund Ⅱ” raised about 20 billion yen in total. However, at the time, the Ministry of Finance stopped selling them.

Until the middle of 1980s, although commodity fund in which expectations for high returns were high, it couldn’t keep up with operational technology. So it was extremely an unstable investment product. In this situation, in 1985, Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc. (the later Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.) developed a principal-protected commodity fund (guarantee type fund) and practiced investment methods that could expect stable returns even in futures trading while diversified investment in multiple products.
On the Black Monday in October 1987, on the contrary to most securities investment trusts which were heavily damaged due to loss of principal, these commodity funds made high profits. Therefore, after that, the study on commodity fund progressed rapidly. At that time, it was scientists of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) who led the study and the development. They applied the investment theory built by Dr. Harry Max Markowitz, a financial economist in the U.S. and 1990 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, improved its precision. As a consequence, an engineering approach raised investment technology, for example asset management models that had handled more than thousands of products became analyzable in less than a minute, and futures market gained citizenship as a venue for asset management.
In 1988 in Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation composed two funds, “All Star” and “Polestar”. They were principal secured types that were operated in two types: zero coupon bonds and commodity futures trading. Then, ORIX Corporation sold “ORIX Futures Fund Ⅰ”. Against these commodity funds in the Early Days, the Ministry of Finance began to blame.

（to be continued）

（Futures Tribune・issued June 13, 2023・no.3221）