Hedging long-term exposures with multiple short-term futures contracts

This article analyzes the problem facing an agent who has along-term commodity supply commitment and who wishes to hedgethat commitment using short-maturity commodity futures contracts.As time evolves, the agent has to roll the hedge as old futurescontracts mature and new futures contracts are listed. Thisgives rise to hedge errors. The optimal hedging strategy ischaracterized in a world where contracts of several differentmaturities coexist. The strategy is independent both of theagent's risk aversion and, under certain conditions, of beliefsabout expected returns from holding futures contracts. The methodologyis compared with approaches based on dynamic models of the termstructure. It is tested on data from the oil futures market.     

Economic linkages across commodity futures: Hedging and trading implications

We investigate cross-market trading dynamics in futures contracts written on seemingly unrelated commodities that are consumed by a common industry. On the Tokyo Commodity Exchange, we find such evidence in natural rubber (NR), palladium (PA) and gasoline (GA) futures markets. The automobile industry is responsible for more than 50% of global demand for each of these commodities. VAR estimation reveals short-run cross-market interaction between NR and GA, and from NR to PA. Cross-market influence exerted by PA is felt in longer dynamics, with PA volatility (volume) affecting NR (GA) volume (volatility). Our findings are robust to lag-specification, volatility measure, and consistent with full BEKK-GARCH estimation results. Further analysis, which benchmarks against silver futures market, TOCOM index and TOPIX transportation index, confirms that our results are driven by a common industry exposure, and not a commodity market factor. A simple trading rule that incorporates short-run GA and long-run PA dynamics to predict NR return yields positive economic profit. Our study offers new insights into how commodity and equity markets relate at an industry level, and implications for multi-commodity hedging.     

Food futures to sustain Chinese cities

China's rapid urbanization makes its cities vulnerable to prolonged drought in the interior. Food needs of the cities will sometimes exceed China's carryover stocks. Moreover, its cities are likely to become so large that even the global reserves, as presently accumulated, are inadequate. A survey of the technological possibilities considers food supplies for a world population leveling somewhere between 10–15 billions, with China making up 9–18% of the total. Today's bioscience promises a number of nutritional substitutes two or three generations hence. Once the world overcomes population growth, successors to the strategies proposed in this article should make it possible to sustain Chinese cities at an increasingly high quality of life.     

Volatility forecasting in the Chinese commodity futures market with intraday data

Given the unique institutional regulations in the Chinese commodity futures market as well as the characteristics of the data it generates, we utilize contracts with three months to delivery, the most liquid contract series, to systematically explore volatility forecasting for aluminum, copper, fuel oil, and sugar at the daily and three intraday sampling frequencies. We adopt popular volatility models in the literature and assess the forecasts obtained via these models against alternative proxies for the true volatility. Our results suggest that the long memory property is an essential feature in the commodity futures volatility dynamics and that the ARFIMA model consistently produces the best forecasts or forecasts not inferior to the best in statistical terms.     

中国期货市场套期保值绩效实证研究

为了研究中国期货市场的套期保值绩效，本文利用确定套期保值比率的OLS、B-VAR、ECHM和EC—GARCH四个模型和套期保值绩效的衡量指标，对中国期货的小麦、大豆、铜和铝的套期保值比率和绩效进行了实证研究，使用1998～2004年中国期货与现货价格的周数据来进行单位根和协整检验等计量分析。研究显示，金属期货品种的套期保值比率和绩效比农产品期货品种的套期保值比率和绩效都要高。考虑了协整关系的ECHM和EC—GARCH模型的套期保值比率和绩效比没有考虑协整关系的OLS和B—VAR模型高，样本区间外的套期保值绩效优于样本区间内的绩效。本文认为采用ECMH和EC—GARCH模型进行套朔保值是最佳的策略。     

Hedging with small uncertainty aversion

We study the pricing and hedging of derivative securities with uncertainty about the volatility of the underlying asset. Rather than taking all models from a prespecified class equally seriously, we penalise less plausible ones based on their “distance” to a reference local volatility model. In the limit for small uncertainty aversion, this leads to explicit formulas for prices and hedging strategies in terms of the security’s cash gamma.     

Fed funds futures variance futures

We develop a novel contract design, the fed funds futures (FFF) variance futures, which reflects the expected realized basis point variance of an underlying FFF rate. The valuation of short-term FFF variance futures is completely model-independent in a general setting that includes the cases where the underlying FFF rate exhibits jumps and where the realized variance is computed by sampling the FFF rate discretely. The valuation of longer-term FFF variance futures is subject to an approximation error which we quantify and show is negligible. We also provide an illustrative example of the practical valuation and use of the FFF variance futures contract.     

Hedging customers

You are a marketing director with $5 million to invest in customer acquisition and retention. Which customers do you acquire, and which do you retain? Up to a point, the choice is obvious: Keep the consistent big spenders and lose the erratic small ones. But what about the erratic big spenders and the consistent small ones? It's often unclear whether you should acquire or retain them and at what cost. Businesses have begun dealing with unpredictable customer behavior by following the practices of sophisticated investors who own portfolios comprising dozens of stocks with different, indeed divergent, histories and prospects. Each portfolio is diversified so as to produce the investor's desired returns at the particular level of uncertainty he or she can tolerate. Customers, too, are assets--risky assets. As with stocks, the cost of acquiring them is supposed to reflect the cash-flow values they are likely to generate. The authors explain how to construct a portfolio based on the notion that a customer's risk-adjusted lifetime value depends on its anticipated effect on the riskiness of the group it is joining. They also show how this approach was used to identify the best prospects for Myron Corporation, a global leader in the personalized business-gift industry. The concept of risk-adjusted lifetime value has a transforming power: For companies that rely on it, product managers will be replaced by customer managers, and the current method of accounting for profit and loss--which is by product--will be replaced by one that determines each customer's P&L. Once adjusted for risk, those P&Ls will become the firm's key performance and operational metric.     

Hedging options

This paper considers the problem of forming a hedge when there are perceived profit opportunities. We show that the option price obeys a modified Black and Scholes equation. Iterative methods yield the appropriate hedge ratio.     

Hedging with Chinese Aluminum Futures: International Evidence with Return and Volatility Spillover Indices Under Structural Breaks

This paper examines the hedging performance of the Shanghai futures market, with the London futures market acting as the channel for volatility spillover. Taking into consideration structural change, basis effects, and return and volatility spillover effects, the authors find that the estimated hedging performance is not improved. Their findings suggest that the effectiveness of the hedging performance of aluminum futures contracts in China is not affected by the magnitude or direction of return and volatility spillovers. Therefore, even when the magnitude and direction of volatility spillover from other markets can be correctly predicted, the hedging performance of a futures contract cannot be significantly improved. This paper uses precise measures of return spillovers and volatility spillovers based directly on the framework of vector autoregressive variance decompositions. The study also includes an analysis of both crisis and noncrisis episodes, with modeling on bursts in spillovers.     

Utility Indifference Hedging with Exponential Additive Processes

We determine the exponential utility indifference price and hedging strategy for contingent claims written on returns given by exponential additive processes. We proceed by linking the pricing measure to a certain second-order semi-linear Integro-PDE. As main application, we study the problem of hedging with basis risk.     

Hedging and competition

We consider firms that, all else equal, wish to minimize variability in their internal capital (due to convex costs of raising external funds). The firms can hedge the cash flow risk of the project, but not that of winning or losing the auction. We characterize optimal hedging and bidding strategies in this competition framework. We show that access to financial markets makes firms bid more aggressively, possibly even above their valuation for the project. In addition, hedging increases the variance of bids and makes firm values more dispersed. Further, with hedging, the covariance of internal capital changes with the risk factor is negative, and is more negative, the higher the correlation of the hedging instrument with the risk factor.     

Global Currency Hedging

Over the period 1975 to 2005, the U.S. dollar (particularly in relation to the Canadian dollar), the euro, and the Swiss franc (particularly in the second half of the period) moved against world equity markets. Thus, these currencies should be attractive to risk-minimizing global equity investors despite their low average returns. The risk-minimizing currency strategy for a global bond investor is close to a full currency hedge, with a modest long position in the U.S. dollar. There is little evidence that risk-minimizing investors should adjust their currency positions in response to movements in interest differentials.     

Setting the futures margin with price limits: the case for single-stock futures

Price limits are artificial boundaries established by regulators to establish the maximum price movement permitted in a single day. We propose using a new censoring method that incorporates the effect of price limits on the futures price distribution and investigates how to set an appropriate daily margin level using single-stock futures in Taiwan. We compare our estimations with those obtained using the method in Longin (J Bus 69:383–408, 1999). The results show that (1) the margin levels derived from the Longin method, which ignore price limits in the estimation, are lower than those in our censoring method; and (2) the legal margin for single-stock futures set at 13.5 % by the Taiwan Futures Exchange to avoid default risk appears to be too high.     

中国农产品期货主力及近月合约套期保值效果研究

主力合约和近月合约的偏离是中国期货市场特有的现实问题,它在一定程度上阻碍对中国期货市场功能的发挥。文章以ZCE棉花和DCE豆一期货为代表对中国农产品期货市场进行研究,研究发现,中国ZCE棉花和DCE豆一期货的近月合约套期保值效果明显优于主力合约套期保值效果,但均远远低于发达期货市场的套期保值效果。根据研究结果,本研究结合实际提出几个有针对性的措施,以利于中国农产品期货功能的发挥。     

Hedging the smirk

This article presents a simple “model-free” method for inferring deltas and gammas from implicit volatility patterns. An illustration indicates that Black–Scholes deltas and gammas are substantially biased in the presence of the sort of smirks and smiles evident in stock index options.     

Hedging Corporate Bonds

We examine Treasury bond and stock index futures, the swap curve and two types of hypothetical corporate bond assets as alternative hedging instruments for portfolios of corporate bonds. Conducting ex post and ex ante tests we find evidence that credit quality and maturity are important sources of basis risk when hedging corporate bonds whose credit rating are below triple A. We conclude that a new corporate hedging instrument may be useful for those wishing to hedge corporate bond portfolios provided that transaction costs are not too high relative to existing futures contracts.