The final thesis will focus on explanation of basic knowledge regarding futures contracts trading and possible ways of trading them as the basis for the analytical part. Analytical part is based on real-time trading of stock, currency, index and commodity futures during several days and intraday trading. In several time periods we will focus on the results of portfolio made by these futures traded on american stock markets. In the end we will compare the results of trading with the opportunity cost of the investor and evaluate his behavior on the futures market.

This tesis deals with modern approchaes in the intraday futures trading. My focus is on the euro-dollar market. I test and analyse three strategies with using current methods of technical analyses. Thanks to results I explain how to use these strategies in practice to the profitable swing trading and respond on the emerging market on a daily basis.

This study gives an insight into the behaviour and performance of large speculators and large hedgers in 29 US futures markets. Using a trading determinant model and priced risk factors such as net positions and sentiment index, results suggest hedgers (speculators) exhibit significant positive feedback trading in 15 (7) markets. Information variables like the S&P500 index dividend yield, corporate yield spread and the three months treasury bill rate were mostly unimportant in large players’ trading decisions. Hedgers had better market timing abilities than speculators in judging the direction of the market in one month. The poor market timing abilities and poor significance of positive feedback results suggest higher trading frequency intervals for speculators. Hedging pressures, which measure the presence of risk premium in futures markets, were insignificant mostly in agricultural markets. As a robust test of hedging pressures, price pressure tests found risk premium to be still significant for silver, crude oil and live cattle. The positive feedback behaviour and negative market timing abilities suggest hedgers in heating oil and Japanese yen destabilize futures prices, and points to a need to check CFTC’s (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) position limits regulation in these markets. In fact, large hedgers in these two markets are more likely to be leading behaviour, in that they have more absolute net positions than speculators. Alternatively stated, positive feedback hedgers in these two markets are more likely to lead institutions and investors to buy (sell) overpriced (underpriced) contracts, eventually leading to divergence of prices away from fundamentals. / Atlhought hedgers in crude oil had significant positive feedback behaviour and negative market timing skills, they would not have much of a destabilizing effect over remaining players because the mean net positions of hedgers and speculators were not far apart. While the results are statistically significant, it is suggested these could be economically significant, in that there have been no regulation on position limits at all for hedgers compared to speculators who are imposed with strict limits from the CFTC. Further, mean equations were regressed against decomposed variables, to see how much of the futures returns are attributed to expected components of variables such as net positions, sentiment and information variables. While the expected components of variables are derived by ensuring there are enough ARMA (autoregressive and moving average) terms to make them statistically and economically reliable, the unexpected components of variables measure the residual on differences of the series from its mean. When decomposing net positions against returns, it was found expected net positions to be negatively related to hedgers’ returns in mostly agricultural markets. Speculators’ expected (unexpected) positions were less (more) significant in explaining actual returns, suggesting hedgers are more prone in setting an expected net position at the start of the trading month to determine actual returns rather than readjusting their net positions frequently all throughout the remaining days of the month. While it important to see how futures returns are determined by expected and unexpected values, it is also essential to see how volatility is affected as well. / In an attempt to cover three broad types of volatility measures, idiosyncratic volatility, GARCH based volatility (variance based), and PARCH based volatility (standard deviation) are used. Net positions of hedgers (expected and unexpected) tend to have less effect on idiosyncratic volatility than speculators that tended to add to volatility, reinforcing that hedgers trading activity hardly affect the volatility in their returns. This suggest they are better informed by having a better control over their risk (volatility) measures. The GARCH model showed more reliance of news of volatility from previous month in speculators’ volatility. Hedgers’ and speculators’ volatility had a tendency to decay over time except for hedgers’ volatility in Treasury bonds and coffee, and gold and S&P500 for speculators’ volatility. The PARCH model exhibited more negative components in explaining current volatility. Only in crude oil, heating oil and wheat (Chicago) were idiosyncratic volatility positively related to return, reinforcing the suggestion for stringent regulation in the heating oil market. Expected idiosyncratic volatility was lower (higher) for hedgers (speculators) as expected under portfolio theory. Markets where variance or standard deviation are smaller than those of speculators support the price insurance theory where hedging enables traders to insure against the risk of price fluctuations. Where variance or standard deviation of hedgers is greater than speculators, this suggest the motivation to use futures contracts not primarily to reduce risk, but by institutional characteristics of the futures exchanges like regulation ensuring liquidity. / Results were also supportive that there was higher fluctuations in currency and financial markets due to the higher number of contracts traded and players present. Further, the four models (GARCH normal, GARCH t, PARCH normal and PARCH t) showed returns were leptokurtic. The PARCH model, under normal distribution, produced the best forecast of one-month return in ten markets. Standard deviation and variance for both hedgers’ and speculators’ results were mixed, explained by a desire to reduce risk or other institutional characteristics like regulation ensuring liquidity. Moreover, idiosyncratic volatility failed to accurately forecast the risk (standard deviation or variance based) that provided a good forecast of one-month return. This supports not only the superiority of ARCH based models over models that assume equally weighted average of past squared residuals, but also the presence of time varying volatility in futures prices time series. The last section of the study involved a stability and events analysis, using recursive estimation methods. The trading determinant model, mean equation model , return and risk model, trading activity model and volatility models were all found to be stable following the effect of major global economic events of the 1990s. Models with risk being proxied as standard deviation showed more structural breaks than where variance was used. Overall, major macroeconomic events didn’t have any significant effect upon the large hedgers’ and speculators’ behaviour and performance over the last decade.

In the first chapter, I analyze the question that whether the elasticity of intertemporal substitution or risk aversion is more important determinant of precautionary savings. This is an important question since a significant fraction of the capital accumulation is due to precautionary savings according to studies. Thus, knowing the important determinant of precautionary savings will be helpful to understand the capital accumulation mechanism. I look into the effects of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution and risk aversion on precautionary savings separately by performing simulations in order to obtain numerical results. I find that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is more important determinant than risk aversion. In the second chapter, I study the impact of the introduction of futures trading on the volatility of the underlying spot market for Turkish Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE).The economic literature intensified the debate on the negative or positive impact of futures trading on the stock market volatility. Although there are empirical studies for different countries with mixed results, most of them focus on developed countries. There are a few empirical researches on emerging markets. Analyzing the data, following results are obtained for ISE. First, the results suggest that the introduction of futures trading has decreased the volatility of ISE. Second, the results show that futures trading increases the speed at which information is impounded into spot market prices. Third, the asymmetric responses of volatility to the arrival of news for ISE have increased after the introduction of futures trading. In the third chapter, I investigate the presence of calendar anomalies in ISE by using GARCH models. The presence of calendar anomalies and their persistence presence since their first discovery still remains a puzzle to be solved. On the other hand, there are some claims that general anomalies are much less pronounced after they became known to the public. Most of the studies have examined the developed financial markets. However, it is important to test the calendar effects in data sets that are different from those in which they are originally discovered and so ISE is a good case to test the calendar effects for a developing country. / text

A main subject of the presented master thesis is trading and investing in capital, commodities and foreign exchange markets over the world with support of technical analysis constructed by artificial intelligence. The thesis also produces step-by-step guide to stock and futures trading, building a successful trading system and gaining profits from invested capital.

期貨交易之集中市場自一八四八年芝加哥期貨交易所(Chicago Board of Trade，CBOT)成立以來，不論交易商品種類及合約成交量均日漸成長，並提供避險者及投機者規避價格變動風險及賺取價差之機會。學說與實務不斷地發展與研究，於法律規範與經濟分析之面向亦臻成熟圓融之境界。反觀國內，此套精密設計的交易制度並未導入正軌，而淪為體制外交易，地下期貨公司濫設，假期貨交易之名行之多年，加以國人不成熟之投機心態，整個期貨市場上瀰漫賭博之氣氛，與國外期貨契約市場相差甚鉅，單憑數簡陋之行政規則實無法收取任何成效，如何導正此不正常現象，實乃當務之急。幸而，立法院於民國八十一年七月十日三讀通過「國外期貨交易法」，始賦予期貨交易合法之法律上地位；至八十三年四月，許多期貨經紀商正式營運，樹立我國期貨交易制度嶄新的里程碑。本論文共分五章，茲簡述各章內容：第一章「緒論」，述及本文之研究動機與研究目的，主要是有鑑於國外期貨交易法之公布，提供國人從事國外期貨交易之準據，擬探討期貨經紀商與客戶間之法律關係。第二章「期貨交易制度之簡介」，介紹期貨交易之沿革、意義、流程、法律性質與當事人，期能就期貨交易制度有概括之輪廓。第三章「期貨經紀商」，主要針對期貨經紀商之意義、期貨經紀商與客戶間之法律關係與期貨仲裁制度，配合美國法之相關規定，斟酌國外期貨交易法之各項問題。第四章「期貨經紀商之民事法律責任」，以損害賠償責任為對象，比較我國法（包括國外期貨交易法及民法）與美國法之差異。第五章「結論」，綜合歸納上述四章之見解，扼要地整理總結。

This dissertation aims to study the behavior of intermediaries under market imperfections and the consequences of that for the financial market's functioning. To do so, I focus on two classes of market frictions: funding constraints and information asymmetry. Chapter 1 studies how the dealers' capital constraints affect the market liquidity in the presence of imperfect competition and how recent regulations have shifted the competitive landscape of interest rate swaps. On the subject of informational frictions, Chapters 2 and 3 study empirically and theoretically the pace at which prices incorporate private information under the limited learning capacity of the informed traders. Understanding the microstructure of the swap markets is of interest to both policymakers and academics, especially for it helps in the efficient implementation of post-crisis regulations, namely the Dodd-Frank Act. An understudied dimension of the swap market microstructure is the determinants of the cost of the market-making activity. Using a proprietary regulatory dataset collected by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on both the interest rate swap transactions and the collateral requirements at the London Clearinghouse (LCH), in Chapter 1, I study the key balance sheet constraints that affect the ability of the bank-affiliated dealers to provide intermediation service to the end-users. Most of the interest rate swaps are now mandated to be centrally cleared. This has increased the dealer's need for collateral in the form of highly liquid assets (cash and cash equivalents) to back their swap exposures. Facing capital adequacy measures such as Supplementary Leverage Ratio (SLR), dealers find it even costlier to increase the size of their balance sheet to fund these margins. I show that a 1-percentage point increase in SLR leads to an increase of 1.09 percentage points in the bank's cost of capital per unit of margin requirement. Furthermore, I find the funding spread of the dealers (the difference between the cost of external funding and the risk-free rate) is also a relevant factor for determining the dealer's marginal cost of swap transaction; a cost that is evidently transferred to the end-users in the form of less favorable prices. Measuring the cost of intermediation for the dealer-to-client interest rate swap market is challenging because of the high concentration in the market-- the first seven dealers intermediate more than 50% of the total notional traded. Therefore, one must consider the nontrivial effect of markups in transaction prices to estimate the marginal cost of intermediation reliably. For this reason, I model a differentiated product demand for swaps in the spirit of empirical Industrial Organization (IO) literature and structurally estimate this model to account for the markups in the transaction prices using estimated price elasticities. The demand estimations show economically interpretable heterogeneity among the end-users in their taste for duration risk hedging. The structurally estimated equilibrium model of intermediation can serve as a basis for answering counterfactual policy questions, especially in the debate on the social costs and benefits of excluding initial margins in calculating supplementary leverage ratio. In Chapter 2, I turn the focus to the impact of informational frictions on market-making activity. More specifically, we study the informed trading under random stopping time. Empirical evidence is provided based on an episode of time when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unintentionally disclosed security filings to some investors before the public for several years. For technological reasons, the delay between the private and public disclosure was exogenously random. We exploit the variation in the time window of private information to show the intensity of trades and the speed at which market prices reach their efficiency, decrease with the expected arrival time of public announcement. In addition, we find the learning capacity of the insider determines the evolution of trading intensity over time. In Chapter 3, inspired by the stylized facts observed in the earlier chapter, I extend the Kyle (1985) model of strategic trading to a case with limited learning capacity of both the dealers and the informed traders (insiders). The insider does not perfectly observe the true value of the security, but he continues to hone his knowledge by using private information sources over time. Two classes of equilibria emerge from this model. In one class, the insider trades excessively patiently, and the market efficiency is reached only asymptotically. In the second type, the insider optimally chooses a deterministic time T, before which he trades patiently as in Kyle (1985) until the price reaches its full efficiency. After T, the insider keeps revealing every piece of new information immediately, and the market price stays efficient while the insider keeps making profits. Which equilibrium emerges depends on the insider's learning capacity, initial informational advantage, and the private source's informational content.

Text in English with summaries in English and Afrikaans / The introduction of single stock futures to a market presents the opportunity to assess an individual company's response to futures trading directly, in contrast to the market-wide impact obtained from index futures studies. Thirty-eight South African companies were evaluated in terms of a possible price, volume, and volatility effect due to the initial trading of their respective single stock futures contracts. An event study revealed that SSF trading had little impact on the underlying share prices. A normalised volume comparison pre to post SSF trading showed a general increase in spot market trading volumes. The volatility effect was the main focus of this study with a GARCH(1,1) model establishing a volatility structure (pattern of behaviour) per company. Results showed a reduction in the level and changes in the structure of spot market volatility. In addition, a dummy variable regression could find no evidence of an altered company-market relationship (systematic risk) post futures. / Business Management / M.Com. (Business Management)

Text in English with summaries in English and Afrikaans / The introduction of single stock futures to a market presents the opportunity to assess an individual company's response to futures trading directly, in contrast to the market-wide impact obtained from index futures studies. Thirty-eight South African companies were evaluated in terms of a possible price, volume, and volatility effect due to the initial trading of their respective single stock futures contracts. An event study revealed that SSF trading had little impact on the underlying share prices. A normalised volume comparison pre to post SSF trading showed a general increase in spot market trading volumes. The volatility effect was the main focus of this study with a GARCH(1,1) model establishing a volatility structure (pattern of behaviour) per company. Results showed a reduction in the level and changes in the structure of spot market volatility. In addition, a dummy variable regression could find no evidence of an altered company-market relationship (systematic risk) post futures. / Business Management / M.Com. (Business Management)

Paper [I] tests the success rate of trades and the returns of the Opening Range Breakout (ORB) strategy. A trader that trades on the ORB strategy seeks to identify large intraday price movements and trades only when the price moves beyond some predetermined threshold. We present an ORB strategy based on normally distributed returns to identify such days and find that our ORB trading strategy result in significantly higher returns than zero as well as an increased success rate in relation to a fair game. The characteristics of such an approach over conventional statistical tests is that it involves the joint distribution of low, high, open and close over a given time horizon. Paper [II] measures the returns of a popular day trading strategy, the Opening Range Breakout strategy (ORB), across volatility states. We calculate the average daily returns of the ORB strategy for each volatility state of the underlying asset when applied on long time series of crude oil and S&P 500 futures contracts. We find an average difference in returns between the highest and the lowest volatility state of around 200 basis points per day for crude oil, and of around 150 basis points per day for the S&P 500. This finding suggests that the success in day trading can depend to a large extent on the volatility of the underlying asset. Paper [III] performs empirical analysis on short-term and long-term Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) strategies regarding their exposures to unanticipated risk shocks. Previous research documents that CTA strategies offer diversification opportunities during equity market crisis situations when evaluated as a group, but do not separate between short-term and long-term CTA strategies. When separating between short-term and long-term CTA strategies, this paper finds that only short-term CTA strategies provide a significant, and consistent, exposure to unanticipated risk shocks while long-term CTA strategies do not. For the purpose of diversifying a portfolio during equity market crisis situations, this result suggests that an investor should allocate to short-term CTA strategies rather than to long-term CTA strategies.