Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Practitioner's Abstract The effectiveness of the Class III Milk futures market is analyzed in terms of the reduction in Value-at-Risk (VaR) for milk producers located in four regions: Wisconsin, Northeast, Florida and California. Constant he...

We develop a new multivariate generalized ARCH (GARCH) parameterization suitable for testing the hypothesis that the optimal futures hedge ratio is constant over time, given that the joint distribution of cash and futures prices is characterized by autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH). The advantage of the new parameterization is that it allows for a flexible form of time-varyin...

When using derivative instruments such as futures in order to hedge a portfolio of risky assets, the primary objective is to estimate the optimal hedge ratio (OHR). When agents have mean-variance utility and the futures price follows a martingale, the OHR is equivalent to the minimum variance hedge ratio, which can be estimated by regressing the spot market return on the futures market return u...

This paper compares the performances of the hedge ratios estimated from the OLS (ordinary least squares) method and the constant-correlation VGARCH (vector generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity) model. These methods are evaluated based on the out-of-sample optimal hedge ratio forecasts. A systematic comparison is provided by examining ten spot and futures markets covering cu...

Instead of modeling asset price and currency risks separately, this paper derives the international hedge portfolio, hedging asset price and currency risk simultaneously for estimating the dynamic international optimal hedge ratio. The model estimation is specified in a multivariate GARCH setting with vector error correction terms and estimated for the commodity and stock markets of the U.S., t...

This paper examines the impact of management preferences on optimal futures hedging strategy and associated performance. Applying an expected utility hedging objective, the optimal futures hedge ratio is determined for a range of preferences on risk aversion, hedging horizon and expected returns. Empirical results reveal substantial hedge ratio variation across distinct management preferences a...

We consider the partial hedging of stochastic electricity load pattern with static forward strategies. We assume that the company under consideration maximizes the risk adjusted expected value of its electricity cash flows. First, we calculate an optimal hedge ratio and after that we use this hedge ratio to solve the optimal hedging time. Our results indicate, for instance that agents with high...