Hedging house price risk with futures contracts after the bubble burst

This paper extends the existing literature on managing house price risk. While previous work finds that a hedger would have reduced a large amount of variance in housing returns in Las Vegas, Nevada using Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) futures contracts, we show that neither static nor dynamic strategies would have maintained an effective hedge during the significant decline in housing prices. The inability to hedge house price risk using CME futures contracts ultimately calls into question the long-term viability of housing futures.     

Hedging emerging market bonds and the rise of the credit default swap

On October 5, 2001, when credit spreads were widening, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange CME de-listed the full menu of emerging market Brady bond futures contracts. This is intriguing because at a time when interest in hedging and speculating in emerging market sovereign credit risk should be at its peak, the CME de-listed precisely the sort of contract designed to hedge and speculate in sovereign credit risk. This paper finds statistical evidence suggesting that the developing over the counter CDS contract acted as a substitute product for the Brady bond futures contract thereby undermining the Brady bond futures contract and contributing to its demise.     

News announcements and price discovery in foreign exchange spot and futures markets

This paper studies competition in price discovery between spot and futures rates for the EUR–USD and JPY–USD markets around scheduled macroeconomic announcements. Using both the information shares approach and the common factor component weight approach for futures prices from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), as well as deal prices from spot trading on the Electronic Broking Services (EBS), we gauge how foreign exchange spot and futures markets respond to news surprises. The results show that the spot rates provide more price discovery than do the CME futures rates overall; however, the contribution of the futures rates to price discovery increases in the time surrounding macroeconomic announcement releases.     

Pricing rainfall futures at the CME

Many business people such as farmers and financial investors are affected by indirect losses caused by scarce or abundant rainfall. Because of the high potential of insuring rainfall risk, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) began trading rainfall derivatives in 2011. Compared to temperature derivatives, however, pricing rainfall derivatives is more difficult. In this article, we propose to model rainfall indices via a flexible type of distribution, namely the normal-inverse Gaussian distribution, which captures asymmetries and heavy-tail behaviour. The prices of rainfall futures are computed by employing the Esscher transform, a well-known tool in actuarial science. This approach is flexible enough to price any rainfall contract and to adjust theoretical prices to market prices by using the calibrated market price of risk. The empirical analysis is conducted with US precipitation data and CME futures data providing first results on the market price of risk for rainfall derivatives.     

Pricing Efficiency and Arbitrage in the Bitcoin Spot and Futures Markets

This study examines the pricing efficiency for the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin using spot prices and all CBOE and CME futures contracts traded from January 2018 to March 2019. We find that the futures basis provide some predictive power for future changes in the spot price and in the risk premium. However, the basis of Bitcoin is a biased predictor of the future spot price changes. Cointegration tests also demonstrate that futures prices are biased predictors of spot prices. Deviations from no-arbitrage between spot and futures markets are persistent and widen significantly with Bitcoin thefts (hacks, frauds) as well as alternative cryptocurrency issuances.     

Daily Changes in Fed Funds Futures Prices

This paper explores the properties of daily changes in the prices for near-term fed funds futures contracts. The paper finds these contracts to be excellent predictors of the fed funds rate, and shows that the claim of a nonzero term premium in the short-horizon contracts is more sensitive to outliers than previous research appears to have recognized. I find some statistically significant evidence of serial correlation in the daily changes, but this accounts for only a tiny part of the 1-day movements and there is essentially zero predictability for horizons longer than 1 day. Settlement futures prices for each day appear to incorporate the information embodied in that day's term structure of longer-horizon Treasury securities. Previous employment growth makes a statistically significant contribution to predicting futures price changes, though again this could only account for a tiny part of the daily variance. The paper concludes that futures prices provide a very useful measure of the daily changes in the market's expectation of near-term changes in Fed policy.     

Does futures exhibit maturity effect? New evidence from an extensive set of US and foreign futures contracts

In a seminal article, Samuelson (1965) [Samuelson, P. A. (1965), “Proof that properly anticipated prices fluctuate randomly,” Industrial Management Review 6, 41-49.] proposes the maturity effect that the volatility of futures prices should increase as futures contract approaches maturity. This study provides new evidence on the maturity effect by examining a more extensive set of futures contracts than previous studies and analyzing each contract separately. Using 6805 futures contracts drawn from 61 commodities, including some data from non-US markets, we find that the maturity effect is absent in the majority of contracts. In addition, the maturity effect tends to be stronger in agricultural and energy commodities than in financial futures. We also examine the hypothesis in Bessembinder et al. (1996) [Bessembinder, H., J. F. Coughenour, P. J. Seguin, & M. M. Smoller (1996), “Is there a term structure of futures volatilities? Reevaluating the Samuelson hypothesis,” Journal of Derivatives 4, 45-58.], which states that negative covariance between the spot price and net carry cost causes the maturity effect in futures. Our results provide very weak evidence in favor of this hypothesis.     

境外人民币衍生品的发展及其对我国的影响

近年来,境外金融市场相继推出人民币衍生品,如场外人民币无本金交割远期（NDF）、美国芝加哥商品交易所（CME）人民币期货和期货期权产品等。文章介绍了境内外人民币远期产品的交易情况,并利用近一年的交易数据对三个市场价格的相关性、拟合程度以及相互引导关系进行了深入分析,认为境内外人民币衍生品市场的互动性较强,国内银行间外汇市场对境外市场价格具有一定的引导作用,人民币汇率定价权并未如部分人士认为的那样旁落境外。     

Detecting and modelling the jump risk of CO2 emission allowances and their impact on the valuation of option on futures contracts

Modelling CO₂ emission allowance prices is important for pricing CO₂ emission allowance linked assets in the emissions trading scheme (ETS). Some statistical properties of CO₂ emission allowance prices have been discovered in the literature ignoring price jumps. By employing real data from the ETS, this research first detects the jump risk using a jump test and then verifies jump effects in modelling CO₂ emission allowance prices by comparing the in-sample and out-of-sample model performance. We suggest a model which can capture the statistical properties of autocorrelation, volatility clustering and jump effects is more appropriate for modelling CO₂ emission allowance prices. We establish a general framework for pricing CO₂ emission allowance options on futures contracts with these properties and find that the jump risk significantly affects the value of the CO₂ emission allowance option on futures contracts. More importantly, we demonstrate that the dynamic jump ARMA–GARCH model can provide more accurate valuations of the CO₂ emission allowance options on futures than other models in terms of pricing error.     

The Traditional Hedging Model Revisited with a Nonobservable Convenience Yield

This article examines the hedging of constrained commodity positions with futures contracts. We extend the study of Adler and Detemple (1988a, 1988b) to include a partial information framework where the convenience yield is not observable. As a consequence, futures prices depend on investor's beliefs regarding the value of the convenience yield, and every component of the hedge is impacted by these beliefs. We achieve a decomposition of the demand that clarifies the impact on the optimal hedge of the beliefs, the spot price and the risk‐free rate as well as the hedging horizon.     

Trading activity and price discovery in Bitcoin futures markets

This study examines the impact of trading activities on price discovery in the Bitcoin futures markets. We find that trades of hedgers are positively correlated with the modified information shares in both CME and CBOE futures markets, suggesting that their trading promotes futures market efficiency. Retailers’ trading activity relates negatively to the price discovery of the CME Bitcoin futures and thus destabilizes the market. Speculators exert positive (negative) impact on the price discovery in the CME (CBOE) Bitcoin futures. Our finding that CME’s Bitcoin futures exhibit superior price discovery than CBOE’s provides plausible justification for CBOE’s decision in March 2019 to suspend further listings of Bitcoin futures contracts.     

Forward contracts and futures contracts

This paper provides a detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between forward contracts and futures contracts. Under frictionless markets and continuous trading, simple arbitrage arguments are invoked to value forward contracts, to relate forward prices and spot prices, and to relate forward prices and futures prices. We also argue that forward prices need not equal futures prices unless default free interest rates are deterministic.     

Commodity derivatives valuation with autoregressive and moving average components in the price dynamics

In this paper, we develop a continuous time factor model of commodity prices that allows for higher-order autoregressive and moving average components. We document the need for these components by analyzing the convenience yield’s time series dynamics. The model we propose is analytically tractable and allows us to derive closed-form pricing formulas for futures and options. Empirically, we estimate a parsimonious version of the general model for the crude oil futures market and demonstrate the model’s superior performance in pricing nearby futures contracts in- and out-of-sample. Most notably, the model substantially improves the pricing of long-horizon contracts with information from the short end of the futures curve.     

Momentum strategies in commodity futures markets

The article tests for the presence of short-term continuation and long-term reversal in commodity futures prices. While contrarian strategies do not work, the article identifies 13 profitable momentum strategies that generate 9.38% average return a year. A closer analysis of the constituents of the long–short portfolios reveals that the momentum strategies buy backwardated contracts and sell contangoed contracts. The correlation between the momentum returns and the returns of traditional asset classes is also found to be low, making the commodity-based relative-strength portfolios excellent candidates for inclusion in well-diversified portfolios.     

The volatility effect of futures trading: Evidence from LSE traded stocks listed as individual equity futures contracts on LIFFE

This study investigates the impact of LIFFE's introduction of individual equity futures contracts on the risk characteristics of the underlying stocks trading on the LSE. We employ the Fama and French three-factor model (TFM) to measure the change in the systematic risk of the underlying stocks which arises subsequent to the introduction of futures contracts. A GJR-GARCH(1,1) specification is used to test whether the futures contract listing affects the permanent and/or the transitory component of the residual variance of returns, and a control sample methodology isolates changes in the risk components that may be caused by factors other than futures contract innovation. The observed increase (decrease) in the impact of current (old) news on the residual variance implies that futures contract listing enhances stock market efficiency. There is no evidence that futures innovation impacts on either the systematic risk or the permanent component of the residual variance of returns.     

New No-arbitrage Conditions and the Term Structure of Interest Rate Futures

Interest rate futures are basic securities and at the same time highly liquid traded objects. Despite this observation, most models of the term structure of interest rate assume forward rates as primary elements. The processes of futures prices are therefore endogenously determined in these models. In addition, in these models hedging strategies are based on forward and/or spot contracts and only to a limited extent on futures contracts. Inspired by the market model approach of forward rates by Miltersen, Sandmann, and Sondermann (J Finance 52(1); 409–430, 1997), the starting point of this paper is a model of futures prices. Using, as the input to the model, the prices of futures on interest related assets new no-arbitrage restrictions on the volatility structure are derived. Moreover, these restrictions turn out to prevent an application of a market model based on futures prices.     

The role of speculation in international futures markets on commodity prices

The role of futures contracts on spot prices has been one of the key focus areas of research since the recent surge in commodity prices and increase in the volatility of commodity returns. However, no consensus arises from this literature, and hence it is difficult to link the use of futures contracts in agricultural commodities by non-hedgers and the growing food insecurity within developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to highlight causal relationships from futures contracts to spot prices of underlying assets, namely agricultural commodities. As research that focus on exchange-traded funds do not provide any clear conclusions, we focus on the imbalance between short- and long-open positions, this imbalance being caused by the exchange traded funds’ participation in futures markets. In this paper, we estimate relationships between financial variables including indicators for speculation in futures markets and the returns of cocoa, corn, soybean, wheat, coffee, rice, and sugar on a weekly basis from 1998 to 2013. Significant results lead to Granger-causality tests that in turn validate the hypothesis of a positive impact of speculation in futures markets to returns on the underlying commodities.     

金融双语

股指期贷 股票指数期货（简称＂股指期货＂）是一种在未来某特定时间以特定价格买卖某种股票指数价值的合约.     

A Pricing Framework for Real Estate Derivatives

New methods are developed here for pricing the main real estate derivatives — futures and forward contracts, total return swaps, and options. Accounting for the incompleteness of this market, a suitable modelling framework is outlined that can produce exact formulae, assuming that the market price of risk is known. This framework can accommodate econometric properties of real estate indices such as predictability due to autocorrelations. The term structure of the market price of risk is calibrated from futures market prices on the Investment Property Databank index. The evolution of the market price of risk associated with all five futures curves during 2009 is discussed.     

The quality option implicit in futures contracts

The quality option implicit in futures contracts allows the short position to satisfy the contract by delivering one of a variety of specified assets. If, at the time the contract is purchased, knowledge of which of the allowed assets will be cheapest at maturity is uncertain, then the quality option will have value. The greater the value of this option, the lower will be the futures price. This paper presents, and tests, a futures pricing model that incorporates the quality option aspect of commodity futures contracts. Our research shows that the quality option has a significant impact on futures prices.