Norway and Australia as possible Commodity Proxies?

I actually attended a FSM dinner seminar (the dinner was good) where the speaker was asked how whether the fund he was managing invested in commodities like oil. His replied that if he wanted to be long oil, he would buy Krone and Rubles and if he was short oil, he would just sell Krone and Rubles.  In other words, there was no need to deal with contango and backwardation which come with dealing in oil contracts.  This made me wonder whether the equity market had a reasonable correlation with oil and I discovered that there was some correlation. Also, some reports indicated that the Norweigian stock market had reasonable valuations so I added NORW as (an imperfect) proxy to oil.


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EWA - Australia
EWS - Singapore
SPY - USA
NORW - Norway

DBA - agriculture
DBB - base metals
DBC - commodities


Which of the 4 equity markets has the highest correlation to DBC - Norway

Which of the 4 equity markets has the highest correlation to DBB - Australia

Which of the 4 equity markets has the highest correlation to DBA - Norway (not a significant correlation).

Correlation is an additional tool that the asset allocating investor should use. By itself it doesn't tell you whether the market is undervalued or overvalued. It also doesn't tell you which one will go up more. However, I will pick the one that gives more dividends :D


Bonus round, correlation of NORW, XLE and USO. The correlation is also significant: