The pricing of stock index futures spreads at contract expiration

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the mispricing of calendar spreads for stock index futures. Using recent data drawn from the Sydney Futures Exchange, a sharp increase in the magnitude of spread mispricing immediately prior to maturity of the near contract is documented. This pattern in mispricing is related to a sharp decline in open interest in the near contract and an increase in open interest in the deferred contract. Further, the direction of mispricing of the near and deferred contracts are more likely to move in opposite directions as the near contract approaches maturity. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that traders seeking to roll‐over their positions from near to deferred futures contracts close to maturity increase the magnitude of spread mispricing. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 22:451–469, 2002     

Order imbalance and the pricing of index futures

This study examines whether the aggregate order imbalance for index stocks can explain the arbitrage spread between index futures and the underlying cash index. The study covers the period of the Asian financial crisis and includes wide variations in order imbalance and the indexfutures basis. The analysis controls for realistic trading costs and actual dividend payments. The results indicate that the arbitrage spread is positively related to the aggregate order imbalance in the underlying index stocks; negative order‐imbalance has a stronger impact than positive order imbalance. Violations of the upper no‐arbitrage bound are related to positive order imbalance; of the lower no‐arbitrage bound to negative order imbalance. Asymmetric response times to negative and positive spreads can be attributed to the difficulty, cost, and risk of short stock arbitrage when the futures are below their no‐arbitrage value. The significant relationship between order imbalance and arbitrage spread confirms that index arbitrageurs are important providers of liquidity in the futures market when the stock market is in disequilibrium. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 27:697–717, 2007     

An analysis of the failed municipal bond and note futures contracts

This study analyzes the failure of the municipal bond and municipal note futures contracts. The municipal bond contract is shown to have been the most effective hedge in the municipal market over its tenure. Changes in volume in the municipal bond contract were closely related to changes in the volume in the U.S. Treasury bond futures contract, the spot–municipal‐over‐bonds (MOB) ratio, and visible supply. The failure of the municipal bond contract is mainly attributed to a decrease in trading volume in the U.S. Treasury futures market. This was impacted by the onset of electronic trading, which the municipal futures market was reluctant to embrace. The municipal note contract was a less effective hedge than U.S. Treasury note futures and ten‐year London Interbank Offered Rate swaps. The failure of the municipal note futures contract is attributed to the existence of well‐established alternative hedges, and segmentation in the municipal market. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 28:656–679, 2008     

The drift factor in biased futures index pricing models: A new look

The presence of bias in index futures prices has been investigated in various research studies. Redfield ( 11 ) asserted that the U.S. Dollar Index (USDX) futures contract traded on the U.S. Cotton Exchange (now the FINEX division of the New York Board of Trade) could be systematically arbitraged for nontrivial returns because it is expressed in so‐called “European terms” (foreign currency units/U.S. dollar). Eytan, Harpaz, and Krull ( 4 ) (EHK) developed a theoretical factor using Brownian motion to correct for the European terms and the bias due to the USDX index being expressed as a geometric average. Harpaz, Krull, and Yagil ( 5 ) empirically tested the EHK index. They used the historical volatility to proxy the EHK volatility specification. Since 1990, it has become more commonplace to use option‐implied volatility for forecasting future volatility. Therefore, we have substituted option implied volatilities into EHK's correction factor and hypothesized that the correction factor is “better” ex ante and therefore should lead to better futures model pricing. We tested this conjecture using twelve contracts from 1995 through 1997 and found that the use of implied volatility did not improve the bias correction over the use of historical volatility. Furthermore, no matter which volatility specification we used, the model futures price appeared to be mis‐specified. To investigate further, we added a simple naïve δ based on a modification of the adaptive expectations model. Repeating the tests using this naïve “drift” factor, it performed substantially better than the other two specifications. Our conclusion is that there may be a need to take a new look at the drift‐factor specification currently in use. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 22:579–598, 2002     

VIX futures pricing with conditional skewness

We develop a closed‐form VIX futures valuation formula based on the inverse Gaussian GARCH process by Christoffersen et al. that combines conditional skewness, conditional heteroskedasticity, and a leverage effect. The new model outperforms the benchmark in fitting the S&P 500 returns and the VIX futures prices. The fat‐tailed innovation underlying the model substantially reduced pricing errors during the 2008 financial crisis. The in‐ and out‐of‐sample pricing performance indicates that the new model should be a default modeling choice for pricing the medium‐ and long‐term VIX futures.     

The forward pricing function of the shipping freight futures market

This article investigates the unbiasedness hypothesis of futures prices in the freight futures market. Being the only market whose underlying asset is a service, it sets it apart from other markets investigated so far in the literature. Cointegration techniques, employed to examine this hypothesis, indicate that futures prices one and two months before maturity are unbiased forecasts of the realized spot prices, whereas a bias exists in the three-months futures prices. This mixed evidence is in agreement with studies in other markets and suggests that the acceptance or rejection of unbiasedness depends on the idiosyncrasies of the market under investigation and on the time to maturity of the contract. Despite the existence of a bias in the three-months prices, futures prices for all maturities are found to provide forecasts of the realized spot prices that are superior to forecasts generated from error correction, ARIMA, exponential smoothing, and random walk models. Hence it appears that users of the BIFFEX market receive accurate signals from the futures prices (regarding the future course of cash prices) and can use the information generated by these prices to guide their physical market decisions. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 353–376, 1999