The information content of Eonia swap rates before and during the financial crisis
Abstract Before August 2007, implied forward rates in the overnight interest swap rates closely reflected market expectations about the future path of the Eonia, and therefore, about the future course of the ECB’s monetary policy stance. Nevertheless, this link was weakened considerably during the most acute episode of the financial crisis. Using the expectations hypothesis of the term structure as a benchmark model for the determination of the overnight interest swap rates, we find that after May 2010 the monetary transmission mechanism was partially restored when the ECB implemented various ‘unconventional measures’ in response to the financial crisis. On the contrary, liquidity and credi…
Firm Size and Volatility Analysis in the Spanish Stock Market
In this article, three strongly related questions are studied. First, volatility spillovers between large and small firms in the Spanish stock market are analyzed by using a conditional CAPM with an asymmetric multivariate GARCH-M covariance structure. Results show that there exist bidirectional volatility spillovers between both types of firms, especially after bad news. Second, the volatility feedback hypothesis explaining the volatility asymmetry feature is investigated. Results show significant evidence for this hypothesis. Finally, the study uncovers that conditional beta coefficient estimates within the used model are insensitive to sign and size asymmetries in the unexpected shock re…
The Economic Value of Volatility Transmission Between the Stock and Bond Markets
This study has two main objectives. Firstly, volatility transmission between stocks and bonds in European markets is studied using the two most important financial assets in these fields: the DJ Euro Stoxx 50 index futures contract and the Euro Bund futures contract. Secondly, a trading rule for the major European futures contracts is designed. This rule can be applied to different markets and assets to analyze the economic significance of volatility spillovers observed between them. The results indicate that volatility spillovers take place in both directions and that the stock-bond trading rule offers very profitable returns after transaction costs. These results have important implicatio…
Asymmetric covariance in spot-futures markets
This article studies how the spot-futures conditional covariance matrix responds to positive and negative innovations. The main results of the article are achieved by obtaining the Volatility Impulse Response Function (VIRF) for asymmetric multivariate GARCH structures, extending Lin (1997) findings for symmetric GARCH models. This theoretical result is general and can be applied to analyze covariance dynamics in any financial system. After testing how multivariate GARCH models clean up volatility asymmetries, the Asymmetric VIRF is computed for the Spanish stock index IBEX-35 and its futures contract. The empirical results indicate that the spot-futures variance system is more sensitive to…
Model Based Monte Carlo Pricing of Energy and Temperature Quanto Options
Weather derivatives have become very popular tools in weather risk management in recent years. One of the elements supporting their diffusion has been the increase in volatility observed on many energy markets. Among the several available contracts, Quanto options are now becoming very popular for a simple reason: they take into account the strong correlation between energy consumption and certain weather conditions, so enabling price and weather risk to be controlled at the same time. These products are more efficient and, in many cases, significantly cheaper than simpler plain vanilla options. Unfortunately, the specific features of energy and weather time series do not enable the use of …
The response of Brent crude oil to the European central bank monetary policy
Este artículo examina el impacto de las decisiones de política monetaria del Banco Central Europeo (BCE) sobre los precios del petróleo y la liquidez mediante un estudio de eventos con datos intradía. Analizamos el período de enero de 1999 a diciembre de 2020, que incluye la crisis financiera que comenzó en agosto de 2007. Nuestros resultados muestran una respuesta significativa de los rendimientos del petróleo solo durante la crisis financiera. Específicamente, encontramos que los rendimientos de los futuros de petróleo crudo Brent respondieron negativamente a variaciones inesperadas en la prima de riesgo italiana como medida de acciones de política monetaria no convencionales, y positivam…
The Response of European Energy Prices to ECB Monetary Policy
To our knowledge, this paper is the first to discuss the response of European energy commodity prices to unexpected monetary policy surprises from the European Central Bank (ECB). Using the Rigobon (2003) identification through heteroscedasticity method, we find a significant and positive response during the crisis period for Brent and coal. Similar results are obtained by other authors for European financial assets in this period. This result reinforces the idea that during this period, financial assets and some commodities positively responded to conventional and unconventional expansionary monetary policy measures, increasing confidence about the survival of the European monetary union. …
Anatomy of Risk Premium in UK Natural Gas Futures
In many futures markets, trading is concentrated in the front contract and positions are rolled-over until the strategy horizon is attained. In this paper, a pair-wise comparison between the conventional risk premium and the accrued risk premium in rolled-over positions in the front contract is carried out for UK natural gas futures. Several novel results are obtained. Firstly, and most importantly, the accrued risk premium in rollover strategies is significatively larger than conventional risk premiums and increases with the time to delivery. Specifically, for strategy horizons between three and six months, this difference increases from 1% to 10%. Secondly, it is the first time that risk …
European Natural Gas Seasonal Effects on Futures Hedging
Abstract This paper is the first to discuss the design of futures hedging strategies in European natural gas markets (NBP, TTF and Zeebrugge). A common feature of energy prices is that conditional mean and volatility are driven by seasonal trends due to weather, demand, and storage level seasonalities. This paper follows and extends the Ederington and Salas (2008) framework and considers seasonalities in mean and volatility when minimum variance hedge ratios are computed. Our results show that hedging effectiveness is much higher when the seasonal pattern in spot price changes is approximated with lagged values of the basis (futures price minus spot price). This fact remains true for short …
SINGLE FACTOR STOCHASTIC MODELS WITH SEASONALITY APPLIED TO UNDERLYING WEATHER DERIVATIVES VARIABLES
This paper estimates single factor stochastic models describing daily air temperature behaviour. We modify classical financial models to reflect temperature seasonality and fit them to a time series representing temperatures in Spain. The estimated models are used in Montecarlo simulations to obtain heating and cooling degree-days, which are used as an underlying reference in weather derivatives. The final goal of this work is to obtain an insight into weather derivative valuation, and so making it easier to manage economic activity risks closely related to temperature (i.e. oil, gas and electricity prices and volumes). En este trabajo se estiman modelos estocásticos unifactoriales que desc…
Trading with Asymmetric Volatility Spillovers
: We study the profitability of trading strategies based on volatility spillovers between large and small firms. By using the Volatility Impulse-Response Function of Lin (1997) and its extensions, we detect that any volatility shock coming from small companies is important to large companies, but the reverse is only true for negative shocks coming from large firms. To exploit these asymmetric patterns in volatility, different trading rules are designed based on the inverse relationship existing between expected return and volatility. We find that most strategies generate excess after-transaction cost profits, especially after very bad news and very good news coming from large or small firm…
Volatility transmission patterns and terrorist attacks
The objective of this study is to analyze volatility transmission between the US and Eurozone stock markets considering the effects of the September 11, March 11 and July 7 financial crises. In order to do this, we use a multivariate GARCH model and take into account the asymmetric volatility phenomenon, the non-synchronous trading problem and the crises themselves. Moreover, a graphical analysis of the Asymmetric Volatility Impulse-Response Functions (AVIRF) is introduced, which takes into consideration the crisis effect. Results suggest that there is bidirectional and asymmetric volatility transmission and show the different impact that terrorist attacks had on both markets. El objetivo d…
Forecasting Weekly Electricity Prices at Nord Pool
This paper analyses the forecasting power of weekly futures prices at Nord Pool. The forecasting power of futures prices is compared to an ARIMAX model of the spot price. The time series model contains lagged external variables such as: temperature, precipitation, reservoir levels and the basis (futures price less the spot price); and generally reflects the typical seasonal patterns in weekly spot prices. Results show that the time series model forecasts significantly beat futures prices when using the Diebold and Mariano (1995) test. Furthermore, the average forecasting error of futures prices reveals that they are significantly above the settlement spot price at the ‘delivery week’ and th…
Optimal hedging under biased energy futures markets
Abstract Optimal futures hedging positions for those agents trying to maximize their expected utility will depend on their view about the evolution of the market and on how risk adverse they are. The most risk adverse agents will probably decide to full-cover their positions. But when a futures bias exists, hedgers with moderate or low degree of risk aversion can alter their strategy depending on the expected gains in futures markets. In our application to the UK natural gas market, we find a statistically significant time-varying negative futures bias that can be forecasted with confidence. As a result of this bias, most effective and best performing hedging strategies for moderate risk-av…
Hedging spark spread risk with futures
Abstract This paper discusses the spark spread risk management using electricity and natural gas futures. We focus on three European markets in which the natural gas share in the fuel mix varies considerably: Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. We find that spark spread returns are partially predictable, and consequently, the Ederington and Salas (2008) minimum variance hedging approach should be applied. Hedging the spark spread is more difficult than hedging electricity and natural gas price risks with individual futures contracts. Whereas spark spread risk reduction for monthly periods produces values of between 20.05% and 48.90%, electricity and natural gas individual hedg…
Analysis of risk premium in UK natural gas futures
Abstract In many futures markets, trading is concentrated on the front contract and positions are rolled-over until the strategy horizon is attained. In this paper, a pair-wise comparison between the conventional risk premium and the accrued risk premium in rolled-over positions on the front contract is carried out for UK natural gas futures. Several novel results are obtained. Firstly, and most importantly, the accrued risk premium in rollover strategies is significatively larger than conventional risk premiums and increases with the time to delivery. Specifically, for strategy horizons between three and six months, this difference increases from 1% to 10% (or from 4% to 20% in annualized …
On the risk premium in Nordic electricity futures prices
Abstract This paper examines empirically the relationship between electricity spot and futures prices, by analysing a decade of data for a set of short term-to-maturity futures contracts traded in the Nordic Power Exchange. It is found that, on average, there are significant positive risk premiums in short-term electricity futures prices. The significance and size of the premiums, however, varies seasonally over the year; whereas it is greatest during winter, it is zero in summer. It is also found that time-varying risk premiums are significantly related to unexpectedly low reservoir levels. Furthermore, before the unprecedented supply-shock that hit the market around the end of year 2002, …