Formative studies have thoroughly examined causality within and between different spot and futures markets with a motivation to discover market co-movements, price leadership effects, and more recently, volatility spillovers across markets. However, the empirical framework within which this has been accomplished has neither analysed foreign spillover effects upon a spot / futures relationship n...

Issues of recent interest and controversy regarding bid-ask spreads in commodity futures markets are investigated. First we apply competing spread estimators to open outcry transactions data and compare resulting estimates to observed spreads. This enables market microstructure researchers, regulators, exchange officials, and traders the opportunity to evaluate the usefulness and accuracy of bi...

Since financial derivatives are key instruments for risk taking as well as risk reduction, it is only straightforward to examine their role in currency crises. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the impact of currency futures trading on the underlying exchange rates. After a discussion of trading mechanisms and trader types, the linkage between futures trading activity and spot ma...

The behavior of managers in initiating a derivatives market position brings to the surface an interesting phenomenon: sometimes managers initiate a position in derivatives markets (i.e., futures and options markets) and sometimes they do not, even though the price volatility of the underlying asset has not changed. The current (hedging) models might explain the phenomenon of derivatives positio...

This paper considers the multiperiod hedging decision in a framework of mean-reverting spot prices and unbiased futures markets. The task is to determine the optimal hedging path, i.e., the sequence of positions in futures contracts with the objective of minimizing the variance of an uncertain future cash flow. The model is used to illustrate both hedging using a matchedmaturity futures contrac...

We investigate the strategic order-splitting behavior and order aggressiveness of different types of traders using a unique dataset on the Taiwan Futures Exchange. By examining the trades and orders for each and every account, we find that, as compared to domestic institutional traders and individual traders, foreign institutional traders and futures proprietary firms are more likely to split t...

A sharp increase in the popularity of commodity investing in the past decade has triggered an unprecedented inflow of institutional funds into commodity futures markets. Such financialization of commodities coincided with significant booms and busts in commodity markets, raising concerns of policymakers. In this paper, we explore the effects of financialization in a model that features institut...

In recent years, market forecasting by machine learning methods has been flourishing. Most existing works use a past market data set, because they assume that each trader’s individual decisions do not affect market prices at all. Meanwhile, there have been attempts to analyze economic phenomena by constructing virtual market simulators, in which human and artificial traders really make trades. ...

We calibrate and test various variants of field theory models of the interest rate with data from Eurodollar futures. Models based on psychological factors are seen to provide the best fit to the market. We make a model independent determination of the volatility function of the forward rates from market data.

This paper examines hedging effectiveness in Greek stock index futures market. We focus on various techniques to estimate variance reduction from constant and time-varying hedge ratios. For both available stock index futures contracts of the Athens Derivatives Exchange (ADEX), we employ a variety of models to derive and estimate the effectiveness of hedging. We measure hedging effectiveness usi...