Calmar Ratio

Not to be confused with the "calmer ratio," which is the proportion of time spent in traffic thinking about how nice it would be to chuck it all and move to a tropical island, where you'd subsist by selling shell necklaces to tourists and sleeping out on the beach. No, instead, the "calmar ratio" is one of many measures of risk/return, usually employed for commodities and hedge funds over a given time period. (Yeah, not designed to make you calmer at all.)

Mathematically, it measures the average compound annual return over the time period divided by the "drawdown" (the % change between the peak and trough values of the investment vehicle being analyzed) over the same time period. The higher the ratio, the better.

So, if two commodities (let's say, pork bellies and frozen concentrate orange juice) both trade at $4 on Jan 1st, peak at $5 on May 8, and close at a 52-week high of $5 on Dec 31st, they each have a one-year return of 25%. But if pork's lowest price of the year was $3 while OJ's was $2, pork had a drawdown of 40% (3 divided by 5 minus 1) while OJ's was 60%.

In this example, the Calmar Ratio for pork was .625 while OJ's was .417, making it the worse investment on a risk-adjusted basis. Which makes sense since bacon is the superior brunch item to OJ (unless champagne is added...that makes OJ better and bacon soggy).