This paper examines the convexity bias introduced by pricing interest rate swaps off the Eurocurrency futures curve and the market's adjustment of this bias in prices over time. The convexity bias arises because of the difference between a futures contract and a forward contract on interest rates, since the payoff to the latter is non-linear in interest rates. Using daily data from 1987-1996, t...

Non-storability of a commodity implies the independence of corresponding spot and futures prices. We investigate empirically the case of electricity and show that a relation does emerge between spots and forwards. This is because of the links in storable fuels used for production and behavioural biases in power trading. The latter cause a significant influence of the electricity spot price on t...

This paper studies the relationship between credit default swap spreads (CDS) for the Energy sector and oil futures dynamics. Using data on light sweet crude oil futures from 2004 to 2013, which contains a crisis period, we examine the importance of volatility and jumps extracted from the futures in explaining CDS spread changes. The analysis is performed at an index level and by rating group; ...

The paper assesses the welfare effects of different ways of allocating input price risk between a regulated utility, consumers and speculators in a futures market. A risk-averse utility setting a fixed retail price requires a price that exceeds expected marginal cost, unless an efficient futures market is available. The firm bears no risk when input price risk is transferred to consumers, but c...

Screen-based futures markets are gaining trading volumes at the expense of traditional open outcry floor markets. In comparison with open outcry trading – used on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the world largest futures market – electronic markets offer enhanced transparency, and greater access to users, who can enter orders directly. Screen markets can also maintain strict time priorities ...

We study the lead±lag relationships among the spot, futures, and options markets on Hong KongÕs Hang Seng Index (HSI). The young options market experiences thin trading, and the option returns lag the cash index returns. The more mature futures market experiences active trading. Yet its lead over the cash index appears to be less than the counterparts in other countries. A possible reason is th...

This paper presents a simple theoretical modei of the spot and futures markets for a storable commodity. We focus our attention in particular on the classical futures markets, those for harvested storable commodities. For these commodities which include grains such as wheat, corn, and soybeans, while there is active trading on the spot and futures markets at each instant, the output of the prod...

This paper assesses how market fundamentals affect asset return volatility by drawing on evidence from the U.S. natural gas futures market. One of the novel features of this paper is the use of the deviation of temperatures from normal (weather surprise) as a proxy for demand shocks and a determinant of the conditional volatility of natural gas futures returns. I estimate a GARCH model using da...

The operation of futures exchanges and the trading on the fl oor is hard to be interpreted without knowing the actors’ main motivations. For the solution of this problem a lot of information is provided by theories aimed at revealing the motives of hedge deals having gained acknowledgment in the international special literature, whose short introduction in this paper is followed by the setting ...

abstract in this paper an attempt is made to determine the most suitable agricultural commodities to be adopted for establishing a futures market in iran. two different approaches are adopted: the first involves identifying factors that contribute significantly to the success or failure of existing agricultural commodities futures contracts in established futures markets. the second involves si...