Michael S. Haigh

INFORMATION CASCADES: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT WITH FINANCIAL MARKET PROFESSIONALS

Previous empirical studies of information cascades use either naturally occurring data or laboratory experiments with student subjects. We combine attractive elements from each of these lines of research by observing market professionals from the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in a controlled environment. As a baseline, we compare their behavior to student choices in similar treatments. We further examine whether, and to what extent, cascade formation is influenced by both private signal strength and the quality of previous public signals, as well as decision heuristics that differ from Bayesian rationality. Analysis of over 1,500 individual decisions suggests that CBOT professionals are better able to discern the quality of public signals than their student counterparts. This leads to much different cascade formation. Further, while the behavior of students is consistent with the notion that losses loom larger than gains, market professionals are unaffected by the domain of earnings. These results are important in both a positive and normative sense.

Commodities and Equities: Ever a 'Market of One'?

Amid the rise in commodity investing that started in 2003, many have asked whether commodities now move more in sync with traditional financial assets. Using daily, weekly and monthly data over 18 years, this article provides evidence largely to the contrary. First, dynamic conditional correlation and recursive co-integration techniques are applied to the prices of, and the returns on, key investable commodity and U.S. equity indices. Compared to the 1991–2002 period, both short- and long-term relationships between passive commodity and equity investments are generally weaker after 2003. Even though the correlations between equity and commodity returns increased sharply in the fall of 2008, during a time of extraordinary economic and financial turbulence, they remained lower than their peaks in the previous decade. Second, the co-movements between equity and commodity returns in periods of extreme returns are analyzed. There is little evidence of a secular increase in spillovers from equity to commodity markets during extreme events. Overall, the results suggest that while commodities provide substantial diversification benefits to passive equity investors, those benefits are weaker precisely when they are needed most.

Causality and Price Discovery: An Application of Directed Acyclic Graphs

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and Error Correction Models (ECMs) are employed to analyze questions of price discovery between spatially separated commodity markets and the transportation market linking them together. Results from our analysis suggest these markets are highly interconnected but it is the inland commodity market that is strongly influenced by both the transportation and commodity export markets. However, the commodity markets affect the volatility of the transportation market over longer horizons. Our results suggest that transportation rates are critical in the price discovery process lending support for the recent development of exchange traded barge rate futures contracts.

Hedging Multiple Price Uncertainty in International Grain Trade

Commodity and freight futures contracts are analyzed for their effectiveness in reducing uncertainty for international traders. A theoretical model is developed for a trader exposed to several types of risk. OLS hedge ratio estimation is compared to the SUR and the multivariate GARCH methodologies. Explicit modeling of the time-variation in hedge ratios via the multivariate GARCH methodology, using all derivatives, and taking into account dependencies between prices, results in reductions in risk, even after accounting for transaction costs. Results confirm that while the commodity futures contracts are important for hedging risk, freight futures are a useful mechanism for reducing risk. Copyright 2000, Oxford University Press.

Fundamentals, Trader Activity and Derivative Pricing

We identify and explain a structural change in the relation between crude oil futures prices across contract maturities. As recently as 2001, near- and long-dated futures were priced as though traded in segmented markets. In 2002, however, the prices of one-year futures started to move more in sync with the price of the nearby contract. Since mid-2004, the prices of both the one-year-out and the two-year-out futures have been cointegrated with the nearby price. We link this transformation to changes in fundamentals, as well as to sea changes in the maturity structure and trader composition of futures market activity. In particular, we utilize a unique dataset of individual trader positions in exchange-traded crude oil options and futures to show that increased market activity by commodity swap dealers, and by hedge funds and other financial traders, has helped link crude oil futures prices at different maturities.

Agricultural liberalization policy and commodity price volatility: a GARCH application

This study examines the effect of the recent radical agricultural liberalization policy, i.e. the 1996 FAIR Act, on agricultural commodity price volatility using Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models. Results of the study indicate that the agricultural liberalization policy has caused an increase in the price volatility for three major grain commodities (corn, soybeans and wheat) and little change for oats, but a decrease for cotton. These findings stand in sharp contrast to Crain and Lees observations in 1996 based on wheat markets that market-oriented measures in government farm policies tend to reduce agricultural price volatility.

Bid–ask spreads in commodity futures markets

Issues of recent interest and controversy regarding bid–ask spreads in commodity futures markets are investigated. First, competing spread estimators are applied to open outcry transactions data and resulting estimates are compared to observed spreads. This enables market microstructure researchers, regulators, exchange officials, and traders the opportunity to evaluate the usefulness and accuracy of bid–ask estimators in markets that do not report bid and ask data, providing an idea of the ‘worst-case’ transaction costs that are likely to be incurred. Also compared, are spreads observed before and after trading was automated (and made anonymous) on commodity futures markets, and it is discovered that spreads have generally widened since trading was automated, and that they have an increased tendency to widen in periods of high volatility. These findings suggest that commodity futures markets have an inherently different character than financial futures markets, and therefore merit separate investigation.

Cointegration, unbiased expectations, and forecasting in the BIFFEX freight futures market

The relationship between freight cash and futures prices is investigated using cointegration econometrics. Results illustrate that the BIFFEX futures market is unbiased, and hence efficient for the current, one, two, and quarterly contract horizons. Since the futures contract is based on an index of various shipping routes, which has undergone several changes since its inception, stability in the relationship between the spot and futures rates is investigated using rolling cointegration techniques. Results indicate that the futures contract appears to have become more efficient over time in predicting the spot rate, and that the decrease in trading volume found in the BIFFEX market is not driven by a lack of efficiency in this market. Rather, the decrease in futures trading might be attributed to the growth rate of the freight forward market. This article incorporates the long‐run cointegrating relationships between cash and futures prices in a forecasting model and compares the forecasting performance of this model with several alternatives. It is found that while the futures price is the best predictor of future spot rates for the current‐month contract, time‐series models can outperform the futures contract at longer contract horizons.

Commodities and Equities: 'A Market of One'?

Amidst a sharp rise in commodity investing, many have asked whether commodities nowadays move in sync with traditional financial assets. Using daily, weekly and monthly data, we provide evidence that challenges this idea. Applying dynamic correlation and recursive cointegration techniques, we find that the relation between the returns on investable commodity and U.S. equity indices did not change significantly from January 1991 to May 2008. Importantly, we provide the first analysis of co-movement during periods of extreme returns. Again, we find no evidence of a secular increase in co-movement between the returns on commodity and equity investments during extreme events.

Integration and Causality in International Freight Markets: Modeling with Error Correction and Directed Acyclic Graphs

Using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and error correction models, we study the dynamics of freight prices that comprise the Baltic Panamax Index (BPI), the index on which freight futures trading was based. The DAGs are used to make statements about the contemporaneous correlations between prices and allow us to address the construction of the data-determined orthogonalization on contemporaneous innovation covariance, which is crucial in providing inference in innovation accounting techniques. Our results provide a source of information on price discovery and suggest that the index is not appropriately composed and weighted, which may help explain the failure of the Baltic International Freight Futures Exchange (BIFFEX) contract.