Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Breslau.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ruprecht-Karl-Universität zu Heidelberg.

The efficiency of commodity futures markets is a widely debated topic in academia. The cotton futures market is no exception. The existence of trends in the futures market is characterized as a price bias, which is a testable trait. When analyzed, it allows a better understanding of market behavior and allows implementation of more effective income enhancing and/or risk reducing strategies. Three different approaches will be used to test the efficiency of the U.S. cotton futures market: pricing patterns, cointegration, and asset-pricing. In the first approach, pricing patterns, statistical methodology was applied to a dataset of daily futures prices. Returns did not show a consistent trend, supporting arguments of efficiency. Further research into seasonally-differentiated contracts has yielded strong evidence of declining prices. This result differs from previously published work in the most comprehensive study of futures prices, while updating and extending information on pricing patterns in the cotton futures market. Co-integration, the second approach, is a popular method for testing the efficiency of various commodity future and cash markets. Evidence indicates that the cotton futures and cash markets are co-integrated over the last ten years. Results lead to the conclusion that price is discovered in the cotton futures market, reinforcing the notion of an efficient cotton futures market that serves as an indicator for future cotton cash prices. The cotton futures market was also analyzed to explain price movements with an equilibrium asset-pricing framework, in the third approach. In particular, the cotton futures market was analyzed to determine if behavior displayed by the market could be explained by risks specific to the cotton futures contract. Cotton futures do not show significant risk premiums over other financial assets, again supporting the efficient market hypothesis. The three approaches implemented in this thesis are generally supportive of longrun efficiency in the U.S. cotton futures market. An updated analysis of the cotton futures market will allow market participants the most recent information on pricing patterns and the overall long-run behavior of the market. More effective trading and operating strategies can be implemented that will best meet needs of market participants.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the use of commodity derivatives in the oil market. The thesis itself is divided into two main parts - theoretical and practical. The theoretical part is mainly focusing on the description of commodity derivatives in the oil market and the explanation of the mechanism of most often used derivative contracts. The second and more practical part of the thesis examine the use of these derivatives and all benefits and risks associated with trading in commodity derivatives. The potential threats arising from using derivatives as oil market contracts are explained on the example of corporate trading strategy of Matallgesellschaft AG.

by Lam Chi-keung, Wallace, Ng Kim-hung. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-44). / ABSTRACT --- p.iii / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.iv / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.v / LIST OF TABLES --- p.vi / LIST OF FIGURES --- p.vii / LIST OF APPENDICES --- p.viii / CHAPTER / INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / DEVELOPMENT OF METHODOLOGY --- p.7 / cost-of-carry model --- p.7 / Stock Index Futures --- p.9 / Borrowing and Lending Rates --- p.12 / Transaction Costs --- p.13 / Calendar Spread in Stock Index Futures --- p.15 / Discrete Dividend --- p.15 / Futures Spread --- p.16 / SCOPE OF STUDY --- p.18 / Spread and Discrepancy --- p.18 / Trading Rule --- p.18 / Predicting Market Price by Equilibrium Futures Price --- p.21 / DATA --- p.22 / RESULTS --- p.26 / Descriptive Statistics --- p.26 / Stimulated Trading Rule --- p.27 / Regression Analysis --- p.28 / CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION --- p.29 / APPENDIX --- p.31 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.38

Generally, investment in commodity ETFs cannot produce similar performance as well as spot goods. Evidence shows that ¡§rolling¡¨ futures positions experience ¡§contango and the effects on contango will harm ETFs¡¨ value. This study shows that two ETFs, USO and UNG, underperform the spot substantially because of rolling in the crude oil and natural gas market, respectively. In this study we employ four energy sector futures market data from the Thomson Reuters to investigate the impact of rolling positions on the relation between commodity index funds and in contango/backwardation. This paper finds that increasing trading in commodity index fund made futures market more contango in the WTI crude oil, natural gas and heating oil markets. This study termed the strategy as the Backwardation Sensitive Trading (BST) . Moreover, this research designs an investment strategy based on variation of backwardation. That is to examine whether BST can make a successful arbitrage: increase holding when the market is more contango and decrease holding when the market is more backwardation. Our strategy performs better than USO and UNG, and those performances perform lower tracking error on oil and natural gas over 2006 to 2010.

[pt] Na década de 1990, diversos países, inclusive o Brasil, entre 1996 e 2003, iniciaram a reestruturação de seus setores elétricos e criaram mercados livres para negociação de energia. O crescimento desses mercados tem demandado a adaptação de instrumentos financeiros de gestão de riscos e retornos as suas especificidades. No Brasil, o mercado tem, ainda, uma estrutura de balcão desorganizado e descentralizado, o que dificulta seu aprendizado. Os contratos a termo de energia elétrica, negociados bilateralmente, no país, são o principal instrumento para a mitigação de riscos e a avaliação de investimentos. Nesse contexto, o objetivo deste estudo é compreender melhor a dinâmica dos preços a termo de energia elétrica praticados no Brasil. Assim, é proposto um método para construção de curvas a termo com base apenas em informações de mercado e feita uma primeira aplicação dessa metodologia. Alguns indícios ficaram, então, evidentes sobre o comportamento do mercado brasileiro a termo de energia elétrica: configuração de contango em alguns períodos, presença de elevados prêmios de risco e aderência apenas relativa dos preços a termo às expectativas de futuros preços à vista. Estudos realizados a partir de mercados estruturados de energia elétrica suportam essas evidências. / [en] In the 1990s, several countries, including Brazil, between 1996 and 2003, began to restructure their electricity sectors and established free markets for energy trading. The growth of these markets has required the adaptation of financial instruments for risk management and return to their specifications. In Brazil, the market has still a disorganized and decentralized OTC (over the counter market) structure, which hinders their learning. The forward contracts for electricity, negotiated bilaterally, in the country, are the primary instrument to mitigate risks and evaluate investments. In this context, the objective of this study is to better understand the dynamics of the forward price of electricity negotiated in Brazil. Thus, we propose a method to construct the forward curve based only on market information and made a first application of this methodology. Some clues were then evident on the behavior of the Brazilian forward market of electricity: contango set in certain periods, presence of high risk premiums and only partial adherence of forward prices on the expectations of future spot prices. Studies based on structured electricity markets support these evidences.

The first chapter of this dissertation estimates the relative contributions of two major exchanges on crude oil futures to the price discovery process-- Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), using trade-by-trade data in 2008. The study also empirically analyzes the effects of trading characteristics on the information share of these two markets. Trading characteristics examined in the study include trading volume, trade size, and trading costs. On average, CME is characterized by greater volume and trade size but also slightly greater bid-ask spread. CME leads the process of price discovery and this leadership is caused by relative trade size and volatility before the financial crisis of 2008; however post-crisis period this leadership is caused by trading volume. Moreover, this study presents evidence that, in times of large uncertainty in the market, the market maker charges a greater bid-ask spread for the more informative market. The second chapter examines the influence of expected oil price volatility, the behavior of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the US Dollar exchange rate volatility on the backwardation of crude oil futures during the period from January 1986 to December 2008. The results indicate that oil futures are strongly and weakly backwardated 57% and 69% of the time, respectively. The regression analysis of weak backwardation shows that oil volatility, OPEC overproduction (difference between quota and the actual production), and the volatility of the US Dollar against the Japanese Yen have a positive significant effect on oil backwardation, while OPEC production quota imposed on its members has a negative significant effect on oil backwardation. However the volatility of US Dollar against the British Pound has no significant effect on oil backwardation. The regression analysis of strong backwardation produces qualitatively the same results except that volatility has no effect. In a sub-period analysis, evidence also indicates that trading volume of oil funds and backwardation are negatively related, suggesting that oil funds increase the demand of futures relative to that of spot.

This study investigates how term structure dynamics of VIX futures can be exploited forabnormal returns. To be able to access volatility as a tradeable asset, the trading strategiesonly trades ETFs which are designed to replicate the movements of VIX futures index. Itis established that such ETFs are unsuitable for buy-and-hold investments because of thenegative roll yield it usually suffers, caused by the slope of the VIX term structure.Consequently, these conditions create opportunities for strategies that use direct andinverse VIX ETFs to be profitable. The study is a quantitative study that uses historicalprice data to back test three different trading strategies. The strategies are tested over theperiod 11-oct-2011 to 31-mar-2020. The authors have deliberately chosen to delimit thestudy by not testing the performance of the ETFs, not statistically test the risk-adjustedreturns and not perform a regression to calculate optimal hedge ratios for the strategies.The results from this study shows that its possible for strategies that exploit the termstructure dynamics of VIX futures to generate abnormal returns.

Submitted by Nelson Danilo Sykora (sykora1@gmail.com) on 2013-07-08T21:29:23Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese _ Nelson D Sykora.pdf: 1461672 bytes, checksum: 6346c144802522b574a243adb52ade3c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2013-08-13T19:44:44Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese _ Nelson D Sykora.pdf: 1461672 bytes, checksum: 6346c144802522b574a243adb52ade3c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-08-13T19:45:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese _ Nelson D Sykora.pdf: 1461672 bytes, checksum: 6346c144802522b574a243adb52ade3c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-01-28 / The relationship between spot and future market and commodity price Backwardation have had an emphasis on the literature of economics and finance. The aim of this paper is to present the main causes responsible for the behavior of Backwardation and to identify the properties that characterize the equilibrium in agricultural commodit y prices. Be the existence of risk premium or the convenience yield, the unders tanding of the effects on the replication of future price and on the term structure of commodity prices remains an open issue. On the other hand, t he p remise of perfect p ortfolio replication and the absence of market frictions imply that the understanding of c ommodity price Backwardation comes from the understanding of the stochastic process of the underlying asset itself . The risk - neutral pricing allied with signs of reversion in prices supports pricing models such as Schwartz and Smith (2000), whose calibration and results will be presented for soybeans. / A relação entre preços do mercado spot e do mercado futuro e a evidência de Mercado Invertido (backwardation) na estrutura a termo de commodities têm tido ênfase na literatura de economia e de finanças. O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar as principais causas responsáveis pelo comportamento de Mercado Invertido e identificar as propriedades que caracterizam o equilíbrio de preços em commodities agrícolas. Seja pela existência de prêmio de risco ou do benefício de conveniência, o entendimento dos efeitos sobre a replicação do preço futuro e sobre a estrutura a termo de preços ainda permanece em aberto. A premissa de perfeita replicação de portfólios e a ausência de fricções de mercado implicam, por outro lado, que o entendimento do comportamento de Mercado Invertido advém da compreensão do processo estocástico do próprio ativo subjacente. O apreçamento neutro ao risco, amparado pelos sinais de reversão de preços, permite a modelagem de preços conforme o proposto em Schwartz e Smith (2000), cuja calibração e os resultados serão apresentados para a soja.