Price dynamics in refined petroleum spot and futures markets

This article characterizes the spot and futures price dynamics of two important physical commodities, gasoline and heating oil. Using a non-linear error correction model with time-varying volatility, we demonstrate many new results. Specifically, the convergence of spot and futures prices is asymmetric, non-linear, and volatility inducing. Moreover, spreads between spot and futures prices explain virtually all spot return volatility innovations for these two commodities, and spot returns are more volatile when spot prices exceed futures prices than when the reverse is true. Furthermore, there are volatility spillovers from futures to spot markets (but not the reverse), futures volatility shocks are more persistent than spot volatility shocks, and the convergence of spot and futures prices is asymmetric and non-linear. These results have important implications. In particular, since the theory of storage implies that spreasd vary with fundamental supply and demand factors, the strong relation between spreads and volatility suggests that these fundamentals — rather than trading induced noise — are the primary determinants of spot price volatility. The volatility spillovers, differences in volatility persistence, and lead-lag relations are consistent with the view that the futures market is the primary locus of informed trading in refined petroleum product markets. Finally, our finding that error correction processes may be non-linear, asymmetric, and volatility inducing suggests that traditional approaches to the study of time series dynamics of variables that follow a common stochastic trend that ignore these complexities may be mis-specified.     

Informational linkage and price discovery between China's futures and spot markets: Evidence from the US–China trade dispute

This study examines the effects of the US–China trade dispute on the informational linkages and price discovery between China's futures and spot markets. Using the daily price data of four assets representing the real and financial sectors in China during 2016–2019, empirical findings suggest that the futures–spot correlations for the stock index, copper, and corn markets have increased significantly during the trade dispute. In contrast, sharp declines in the dynamic correlations between gold futures and spot markets, as gold is a safe haven asset, are observed during the event window. During uncertainty disturbance (i.e., the trade dispute), the futures–spot cointegrated relationships in the gold and corn markets are found to adjust more quickly and efficiently, whereas the correction speeds of the market deviations for the stock index and copper market are moderately slower. With the intensive integration of market expectations with uncertainty shocks, the economic shocks of trade disputes tend to remarkably improve the pricing efficiency of China's futures markets, except for the gold futures market. China's spot markets, however, seem to be more sensitive to the noise trades and information disturbances arising from the trade dispute.     

Dynamic spillover effects in futures markets: UK and US evidence

Previous studies on spillover effects in futures markets have so far confined themselves to static analyses. In this study, we use a newly introduced spillover index to examine dynamic spillovers between spot and futures markets volatilities, volume of futures trading and open interest in the UK and the US. Based on a dataset over the period February 25, 2008 to March 14, 2013, that encompasses both the global financial crisis and the Eurozone debt crisis, we find that spot and futures volatilities in the UK (US) are net receivers (net transmitters) of shocks to volume of futures trading and open interest. The analysis also sheds light on the dynamic interdependence of spot and futures markets volatilities between the US and the UK. Specifically, the spot and futures volatility spillovers between the UK and US markets are of bidirectional nature, however, they are affected by major economic events such as the global financial and Eurozone debt crises. Several robustness checks endorse our main findings. Overall, these results have important implications for various market participants and financial sector regulators.     

国内外黄金市场价格间的联动关系稳定吗?——基于外部冲击视角的分析

在全球金融市场不断开放和融合的大背景下,黄金市场不但与外部市场频繁互动,其系统内部的联动关系也变得极为多元和复杂,黄金市场间的价格联动反映了信息和风险在不同市场间的传递过程。黄金价格通常会受到外部因素干扰而产生波动,但市场间的联动关系是否会因此而改变是值得重点关注的问题,黄金市场功能的有效性及稳固的市场关系是投资者利用全球黄金市场进行对冲和避险的先决条件,同时也关系到整个金融市场的稳定性。本文将研究重点聚焦于黄金市场内部,在研究中外各主要黄金市场间动态相关性和波动溢出效应的同时引入外部冲击以检验不同因素对黄金期货、现货市场间联动关系的影响从而探讨国内外黄金市场间价格联动的稳定性问题。结果表明:中国与全球主要黄金期货、现货市场间整体上保持了正相关关系,同时与各主要黄金市场间均存在显著的波动溢出效应。在一般市场条件下,外部冲击并没有显著改变中国与全球主要黄金期货、现货市场间的联动关系,表明黄金市场内部的价格联动具有较强的稳定性。     

Price discovery and volatility spillovers in index futures markets: Some evidence from Mexico

This paper investigates the hypotheses that the recently established Mexican stock index futures market effectively serves the price discovery function, and that the introduction of futures trading has provoked volatility in the underlying spot market. We test both hypotheses simultaneously with daily data from Mexico in the context of a modified EGARCH model that also incorporates possible cointegration between the futures and spot markets. The evidence supports both hypotheses, suggesting that the futures market in Mexico is a useful price discovery vehicle, although futures trading has also been a source of instability for the spot market. Several managerial implications are derived and discussed.     

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.     

Consumption and Hedging in Oil‐Importing Developing Countries

We study the consumption and hedging strategy of an oil‐importing developing country that faces multiple crude oil shocks. In our model, developing countries have two particular characteristics: their economies are mainly driven by natural resources and their technologies are less efficient in energy usage. The natural resource exports can be correlated with the crude oil shocks. The country can hedge against the crude oil uncertainty by taking long/short positions in existing crude oil futures contracts. We find that both inefficiencies in energy usage and shocks to the crude oil price lower the productivity of capital. This generates a negative income effect and a positive substitution effect, because today’s consumption is relatively cheaper than tomorrow’s consumption. Optimal consumption of the country depends on the magnitudes of these effects and on its risk‐aversion degree. Shocks to other crude oil factors, such as the convenience yield, are also studied. We find that the persistence of the shocks magnifies the income and substitution effects on consumption, thus also affecting the hedging strategy of the country. The demand for futures contracts is decomposed in a myopic demand, a pure hedging term and productive hedging demands. These hedging demands arise to hedge against changes in the productivity of capital due to changes in crude oil spot prices. We calibrate the model for Chile and study to what extent the country’s copper exports can be used to hedge the crude oil risk.     

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.     

Modelling International Price Relationships and Interdependencies Between the Stock Index and Stock Index Futures Markets of Three EU Countries: A Multivariate Analysis

This paper addresses the important relationship between stock index and stock index futures markets in an international context. By simply examining the spot‐futures relationship within a single country as most of the extant literature does and thus ignoring possible market interdependencies between countries, the dynamics of price adjustments may be misspecified and thus findings misleading. The main contribution of the paper is to improve our understanding of the pricing relationship between spot and futures markets in the light of international market interdependencies. Using a multivariate VAR‐EGARCH methodology, the paper investigates stock index and stock index futures market interdependence, that is lead‐lag relationships and volatility interactions between the stock and futures markets of three main European countries, namely France, Germany and the UK. In addition, the paper explicitly accounts for potential asymmetries that may exist in the volatility transmission mechanism between these markets. The main conclusions of the paper imply that investors need to account for market interactions across countries to fully and correctly exploit the potential for hedging and diversification.     

A Model of Financialization of Commodities

We analyze how institutional investors entering commodity futures markets, referred to as the financialization of commodities, affect commodity prices. Institutional investors care about their performance relative to a commodity index. We find that all commodity futures prices, volatilities, and correlations go up with financialization, but more so for index futures than for nonindex futures. The equity‐commodity correlations also increase. We demonstrate how financial markets transmit shocks not only to futures prices but also to commodity spot prices and inventories. Spot prices go up with financialization, and shocks to any index commodity spill over to all storable commodity prices.     

新华富时A50股指期货与我国A股市场价格间关系：基于高频数据的研究

利用五分钟高频数据,本文对在新加坡交易所上市的新华富时A50股指期货与我国沪深300股指现货和期货之间的价格变化关系进行了实证分析。主要结果显示：从目前看,国内的沪深300指数现货和期货市场在价格发现和信息传递方面居于主导地位。A50股指期货价格的变动对国内股指现货和期货市场价格的变动并不存在显著的领先和引导作用。     

Price discovery on the S&P 500 index markets: An analysis of spot index,index futures,and SPDRs

This paper investigates the price discovery function in three S&P 500 index markets: the spot index, index futures, and S&P Depositary Receipts markets. Four hypotheses regarding market structure and security design are proposed to differentiate the price discovery function performed by the three index instruments. Using matched synchronous intraday trading data, Johansen's maximum likelihood estimator is employed to disclose the cointegration relationships among the three markets. Results indicate that the three price series are a cointegrated system with one long-run stochastic trend. Estimated coefficients of the vector error correction model suggest that price adjustment takes place in the spot index market and for SPDRs, but not in the futures market. When the common stochastic trend is decomposed, it is found that the futures market serves the dominant price discovery function. The leverage hypothesis and the uptick rule hypothesis explain its superior price discovery function.     

Round-the-clock market efficiency and home bias: Evidence from the international Japanese government bonds futures markets

This paper examines how information is processed between almost identical international futures markets: London (LIFFE) and Tokyo (TSE) JGB futures. In these markets, variations in open-to-open changes are virtually the same as those of close-to-close changes, suggesting that information is transmitted efficiently across markets with small opening pricing errors. The overall results confirm market efficiency around the clock, yet the intraday U-shaped patterns in volume/volatility of the London JGB futures suggest home bias in international investments, indicating a less global view of trading than expected. Specifically, at the LIFFE open, London investors rush to rebalance portfolios instead of doing so at the TSE close, which is only one hour before the LIFFE opens.     

Volatility Transmission in the Real Estate Spot and Forward Markets

How shocks in one market influence the returns and volatility of other markets has been an important question for portfolio managers. In the finance literature, many studies found evidence of volatility spillovers across international markets, as well as between spot and futures markets. Although real estate is often regarded as a good vehicle for diversification, the dynamics of its volatility transmission have been largely ignored. This paper provides the first study to examine volatility spillovers between the spot and forward (pre-sale) index returns of the Hong Kong real estate market through a bivariate GARCH model. Transaction-based indices were used so that our volatility modelling was free from any smoothing problem. Our results showed that real estate returns exhibited volatility clustering, and the volatility of the forward market was more sensitive to shocks than the spot market. Moreover, volatility was mainly transmitted from the forward market to the spot market, but not vice versa.

Onshore and offshore market for Indian rupee: recent evidence on volatility and shock spillover

The article empirically examines the onshor-offshore linkages of the Indian rupee using recently developed multivariate GARCH technique. The empirical results show that the offshore non-deliverable forward market does not have mean spillover impact on onshore spot, forward and futures markets while shocks and volatilities in the non-deliverable forward market influence the onshore markets. A key finding of the study is that the magnitude of volatility spillover from non-deliverable forward to spot market has accentuated after the introduction of currency futures in India. This development could be attributable to large arbitrage between futures and non-deliverable forward market in the more recent period. The finding has critical implications for exchange rate policy and management in the Indian context. There is need for close monitoring of both the onshore and offshore markets.     

Price Discovery,Causality and Forecasting in the Freight Futures Market

This paper investigates the causal relationship between futures and spot prices in the freight futures market. Being a thinly traded market whose underlying asset is a service, sets it apart from other markets investigated so far in the literature. Causality tests, generalised impulse response analysis and forecasting performance evaluation indicate that futures prices tend to discover new information more rapidly than spot prices. Revisions in the composition of the underlying index to make it more homogeneous, have strengthened the price discovery role of futures prices. The information incorporated in futures prices, when formulated as a VECM, produces more accurate forecasts of spot prices than the VAR, ARIMA and random-walk models, over several steps ahead. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Arbitrage, Risk Premium, and Cointegration Tests of the Efficiency of Futures Markets

This article provides a new perspective on the efficiency of futures markets in a cointegration framework. Under the conventional risk premium hypothesis, if futures and spot prices are non-stationary, they must be cointegrated if futures markets are efficient. Alternatively, the cost-of-carry model implies that there should be a cointegration relationship among spot prices, futures prices and interest rates assuming all the series contain a unit root. Market efficiency further implies specific parameter restrictions under these two models. Using data on the futures markets for gold, silver, palladium and platinum, this article first establishes that interest rates, spot and futures prices are unit root non-stationary. The evidence on cointegration is somewhat mixed: the gold futures market is consistent with the cost-of-carry model, and the silver futures market satisfies the risk premium hypothesis, but the evidence for the other two markets is inconclusive.     

中国利率市场的价格发现——对国债现货、期货以及利率互换市场的研究

本文采用信息份额模型和基于向量自回归(VAR)模型的格兰杰因果检验,研究了国债现货、国债期货和利率互换三个市场之间的价格发现机制。信息份额模型表明,从整体来看利率互换相对于国债期货和国债现货都具有信息优势,而国债期货相对于国债现货具有信息优势。另外,国债期货的价格发现能力相对于另外两个市场都在随时间增强。格兰杰因果检验结果显示,利率互换在价格发现中单向引领国债期货以及国债现货,国债期货单向引领国债现货。所有结果一致表明, 利率互换和国债期货这两种利率衍生产品在引导中国利率市场价格发现中发挥了重要作用。     

Informational Frictions and Commodity Markets

This paper develops a model with a tractable log‐linear equilibrium to analyze the effects of informational frictions in commodity markets. By aggregating dispersed information about the strength of the global economy among goods producers whose production has complementarity, commodity prices serve as price signals to guide producers' production decisions and commodity demand. Our model highlights important feedback effects of informational noise originating from supply shocks and futures market trading on commodity demand and spot prices. Our analysis illustrates the weakness common in empirical studies on commodity markets of assuming that different types of shocks are publicly observable to market participants.     

Limits to arbitrage and hedging: Evidence from commodity markets

We build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases in producers' hedging demand or speculators' capital constraints increase hedging costs via price-pressure on futures. These in turn affect producers' equilibrium hedging and supply decision inducing a link between a financial friction in the futures market and the commodity spot prices. Consistent with the model, measures of producers' propensity to hedge forecasts futures returns and spot prices in oil and gas market data from 1979 to 2010. The component of the commodity futures risk premium associated with producer hedging demand rises when speculative activity reduces. We conclude that limits to financial arbitrage generate limits to hedging by producers, and affect equilibrium commodity supply and prices.