Although energy has understandably attracted the most attention this year, wheat, soybeans, and sugar have posted sizeable year-to-date gains and impressive risk-adjusted returns with much less fanfare. Copper offers a useful contrast: despite frequent coverage highlighting its outsized returns, its year-to-date performance has been relatively unremarkable. The distinction between market attention and actual performance is telling. While less influential than energy in shaping economic growth and inflation, the three agricultural commodities remain vital to global food supplies, livestock feed, and biofuel mandates and collectively represent meaningful weights in the two most popular commodity indexes, the S&P GSCI (formerly the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index) and the Bloomberg Commodity Index (BCOM). Equally notable, wheat and soybean prices have moved almost in lockstep in 2026, even as their options structures continue to display the usual seasonal implied volatility pattern. 

First, let’s examine the 2026 returns of the three high-flyers of the agriculture complex: wheat, soybeans, and sugar:  For context, the year-to-date returns of SPY and QQQ through 10/16 are 11.7% and 15.8%, respectively. 

Their performance is even more impressive when assessed using Sharpe ratios, which measure returns above the risk-free rate relative to the volatility incurred:

The performance of soybeans and wheat is particularly interesting in two respects. First, the two commodities have moved almost in lockstep this year:   

The calendar year price correlation stands at an all-time record of 0.919. Also, notice that the shared variance between wheat and soybeans, i.e., the percentage of overlap between two things that move together, stands at 84.50%. In other words, roughly 85% of the price movement in one crop can be explained directly by price moves in the other, leaving only about 15% to individual crop developments with minimal diversification benefit. This is corroborated by the high directional concordance, or the percentage of days in which the price movement (+ or -) was the same. 

Second, both wheat and soybeans continue to display the usual pattern of seasonal implied volatility: 

Crop cycles, weather, and regional supply/demand shocks drive both agricultural commodity prices and their implied volatilities. Tail risk from droughts, freezes, or logistical issues can cause temporary implied volatility shocks. As you can see above, the result is a regular divergence between mean and median metrics during crucial production months.  

 In contrast to the agricultural commodities we have reviewed above, copper has received frequent coverage in the financial press, but its year-to-date performance has been lackluster. Since copper is a crucial and in many cases irreplaceable input to electronics, it has gotten caught up in the endless attention to everything AI. Regardless, those trading it as an AI proxy have been disappointed so far this year. Below is its year-to-date price and implied volatility performance: 

Although copper’s implied volatility has been declining since August, its 2026 year-to-date mean and median are still elevated compared to its long-term statistics. Specifically, 2026 average implied volatility sits at 29.1% and the median at 28.8%, noticeably above their 21-year historical baselines of 26.9% and 24.9%, respectively. With a year-to-date return of 15.5%, copper’s Sharpe ratio is only 0.65 (rf = 4.5%), significantly lower than sugar, soybeans, and wheat.

The financial press often confuses a compelling narrative with actual, risk-adjusted results. This year, while crude oil and copper’s link to the AI boom dominated the headlines, sugar, wheat, and soybeans quietly produced excellent returns with minimal fanfare. Interestingly, as wheat and soybeans have rallied, they have moved in record-breaking lockstep, virtually eliminating any diversification between them. At the same time, they have maintained their usual seasonal harvest-based implied volatility pattern. Significant risk-adjusted returns can often be found in markets that attract the least attention.