Devraj Basu

Capturing the Risk Premium of Commodity Futures: The Role of Hedging Pressure

We construct long–short factor mimicking portfolios that capture the hedging pressure risk premium of commodity futures. We consider single sorts based on the open interests of hedgers or speculators, as well as double sorts based on both positions. The long–short hedging pressure portfolios are priced cross-sectionally and present Sharpe ratios that systematically exceed those of long-only benchmarks. Further tests show that the hedging pressure risk premiums rise with the volatility of commodity futures markets and that the predictive power of hedging pressure over cross-sectional commodity futures returns is different from the previously documented forecasting power of past returns and the slope of the term structure.

International Dynamic Asset Allocation and Return Predictability

The presence of time varying investment opportunity sets has been documented in the context of international asset allocation, and the economic value associated with these is a topic of lively debate in the academic literature. This paper constructs simple, real-time dynamic international asset allocation strategies based on daily data that exploit the return predictability arising from time varying market integration. Our timing strategies outperform the major (US, UK, Japanese and German) country indices and related portfolios, particularly in down markets. The strategies appear to capture much of the economic value of the return predictability implied by market integration and have many of the characteristics of successful timing strategies.

The Optimal Use of Return Predictability: An Empirical Study

In this paper we study the economic value and statistical significance of asset return predictability, based on a wide range of commonly used predictive variables. We assess the performance of dynamic, unconditionally efficient strategies, first studied by Hansen and Richard ( 1987 ) and Ferson and Siegel ( 2001 ), using a test that has both an intuitive economic interpretation and known statistical properties. We find that using the lagged term spread, credit spread, and inflation significantly improves the risk-return trade-off. Our strategies consistently outperform efficient buy-and-hold strategies, both in and out of sample, and they also incur lower transactions costs than traditional conditionally efficient strategies.

Does Conditioning Information Matter in Estimating Continuous Time Interest Rate Diffusions

We examine an important aspect of empirical estimation of term structure models; the role of conditioning information in dynamic term structure models. The use of both real world or simulated data implicitly incorporates conditioning information. We examine the bias created in estimating the drift by a specific form of conditioning, namely truncation. Using the theory of enlargement of nTtrations we provide estimates of the extent of this truncation bias for commonly used short rate models. We find that this truncation bias causes the drift of these models to have a nonlinear structure.

The Performance of Simple Dynamic Commodity Strategies

The authors construct real-time trading strategies based on the dynamic theories of Cootner [1960], Stoll [1979], and Hirshleifer [1990]. These strategies are constructed using the aggregate positions of hedgers. For a sample of 10 liquid commodities they find broad support for these dynamic theories. The active long flat strategies outperform buy and hold strategies, even during a commodity bull market, suggesting that these actively managed strategies are better investments than passive indexes. The results illustrate the importance of being able to capture “phases of backwardation” even during a commodity bull market.

Asset Pricing Anomalies and Time-Varying Betas: A New Specification Test for Conditional Factor Models

In this paper, we develop a new measure of specification error, and thus derive new statistical tests, for conditional factor models, i.e. models in which the factor loadings (and hence risk premia) are allowed to be time-varying. Our test exploits the close links between the stochastic discount factor framework and mean-variance efficiency. We show that a given set of factors is a true conditional asset pricing model if and only if the efficient frontiers spanned by the traded assets and the factor-mimicking portfolios, respectively, intersect. In fact, we show that our test is proportional to the difference in squared Sharpe ratios of these two frontiers. We draw three main conclusions from our empirical findings. First, optimal scaling clearly improves the performance of asset pricing models, to the point where several of the scaled models are capable of explaining asset pricing anomalies. However, even the optimally scaled models fall short of being true conditional asset pricing models in that they fail to price actively managed portfolios correctly. Second, there is significant time-variation in factor loadings and hence risk premia, which plays a significant role in asset pricing. Moreover, the optimal factor loadings display a high degree of non-linearity in the conditioning variables, suggesting that the linear scaling prevalent in the literature is sub-optimal and does not capture the inter-temporal pattern of risk premia. Third, skewness and kurtosis do matter in the conditional setting, while adding little to unconditional performance.

The Global Price of Market Risk and Country Inflation

This paper approaches the central questions of the identification and the price of risk in an international asset pricing context. We construct and use factor mimicking portfolios to obtain factor loadings for testing unconditional and conditional pricing. We use a new measure of specification error for conditional models. The dynamic stochastic discount factor which explicitly admits skewness and kurtosis factors in the aggregate global market portfolio significantly expands the factor frontier more than the effect achieved by adding the Fama-French factors to the return on the world market portfolio. A cubic SDF augmented by country-specific inflation and inflation skewness with time-varying risk premiums that are functions of global predictive variables is the best performing model overall for pricing the size, book-to-market and momentum portfolios in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. The country-specific risks are significantly priced, suggesting that the financial markets in these countries may be partially-segmented.

Exploiting Predictability in International Anomalies

We construct unconditionally efficient asset allocation strategies that ex- ploit return predictability of international size and momentum portfolios. The strategies achieve comparable returns to these investment assets while exhibit- ing much lower volatility. They largely avoid major losses by successfully tim- ing these assets. The strategies utilizing the MSCI world index and the term spread as predictive variables achieve better performance than those without exploiting return predictability. The optimal strategies perform better than conditionally efficient strategies due the conservative response of the optimal portfolio weight to extreme realizations of the predictive variables, thus leading to lower volatility.