Distributional predictability between commodity spot and futures: Evidence from nonparametric causality-in-quantiles tests

Unbiasedness and informational efficiency of futures markets under different market conditions is a claim that still remains unsettled in the theory of non-arbitrage and asset pricing and in empirics as well. This study investigates this claim using a novel causality-in-quantile model of Balcilar et al. (2016) for two energy commodities, crude oil and natural gas, and two precious metals, gold and silver. The model estimates causalities-in-mean and -variance between spot and futures market in a time varying context conditioning on the states of the markets represented by the quantiles of the conditional distribution of the dependent variable. The causality in return is asymmetric and unidirectional from futures to spot market for all commodities. That means the predictability of the futures market, due to its informational efficiency, is strong in the normal market and declines when the spot market enters into extreme bearish and bullish conditions. The causality-in-variance is bi-directional in the normal to bull markets except for natural gas where it is unidirectional from futures to spot only. It is a confirmation of the risk management and price discovery role of futures market. Lack of causality in the bear market entails some kind of disconnectedness between the spot and futures markets in a bad market where intervention is called for from the exchange and regulators to restore stability in the spot and futures market dynamics. Although economic uncertainty is found to have no impact on the causality-in-mean except gold; however, the causality-in -variance is influenced in the case of gold and crude. This is a kind of reaffirmation of the fact that under economic uncertainty, futures contracts are used for hedging under different market conditions. However, the causality between commodity spot and futures are resilient to exchange rate.     

Oil prices,speculation, and fundamentals: Interpreting causal relations among spot and futures prices

A consensus that the world oil market is unified begs the question, where do innovations in oil prices enter the market? Here we investigate where changes in the price of crude oil originate and how they spread by examining causal relationships among prices for crude oils from North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East on both spot and futures markets. Results indicate that innovations first appear in spot prices for Dubai–Fateh and spread to other spot and futures prices while other innovations first appear in the far month contract for West Texas Intermediate and spread to other exchanges and contracts. Links between spot and futures markets are relatively weak and this may have allowed the long-run relationship between spot and future prices to change after September 2004. Together, these results suggest that market fundamentals initiated a long-term increase in oil prices that was exacerbated by speculators, who recognized an increase in the probability that oil prices would rise over time.     

Cointegration between oil spot and future prices of the same and different grades in the presence of structural change

The purpose of this study is to examine whether crude oil spot and futures prices of the same and different grades are cointegrated using a residual-based cointegration test that allows for one structural break in the cointegrating vector and high-frequency data. We choose the US WTI and the UK Brent as the representative crudes for this analysis since these two crudes have well-established spot and futures markets. We find that spot and future prices of the same grade as well as spot and futures prices of different grades are cointegrated. We examine potential causes of structural change as revealed by the cointegration test in terms of events that have impacted on world oil markets as well as discuss the implications of the results for hedge managers, investors and regulators.     

On the short- and long-run efficiency of energy and precious metal markets

This article contributes to the related literature by empirically investigating the efficiency of nine energy and precious metal markets over the last decades, employing several pronounced models. We test for both short- and the long-run efficiency using, in addition to linear cointegration models, nonlinear cointegration and error-correction models (ECMs) which allow the efficiency intensity to change per regime. Our findings can be summarized as follows: i) futures prices are found to be cointegrated with spot prices, but they do not constitute unbiased predictors of future spot prices; ii) the hypothesis of risk neutrality is rejected; iii) the short-run efficiency hypothesis is rejected, suggesting that using past futures price returns improves the modeling and forecasting of future spot prices; and iv) the nonlinear modeling suggests the presence of two distinct regimes wherein the first regime the efficiency hypothesis is supported, whereas in the second it is rejected. The empirical findings have important implications for producers, hedgers, speculators and policymakers.     

Information transmission and market interactions across the Atlantic — an empirical study on the natural gas market

This paper studies the international information transmission and market interactions in the U.S. and U.K. natural gas markets. Three well documented approaches are used to measure the relative importance on the process of price discovery under a quadvariate system. After adjusting the effects of nonsynchronous trading prices, robust results indicate our system that includes spot and futures prices within the two countries are driven by one common factor. Information disseminates efficiently among the four markets concerned. The U.S. futures market dominates as the center for price discovery. The U.K. futures market comes as the second. The spot markets in the U.S. and U.K. are less efficient than their corresponding futures market, where the U.K. spot market contributes the least and almost zero to the price discovery process. Asymmetric volatility spillovers are found in three of the four markets. Volatility in the U.S. futures market increases with positive returns which illustrates the inverse leverage effect in most of the commodity market. Volatilities in the spot markets are negatively related to returns, which is analogous to the traditional leverage effect prevailing in most of the equity stock markets.     

Re-examining the movements of crude oil spot and futures prices over time

We carry out a (partial) replication exercise of Chang and Lee (2015) unit root and cointegration analyses of crude oil spot and futures prices. In doing so, we offer an updated and expanded analysis based on a much wider set of oil futures series than that considered by Chang and Lee, and we consider the impact of different temporal aggregation methods. Although we are not able to exactly replicate their findings, we nonetheless reach qualitatively similar findings to theirs when using their dataset in terms of the long-run properties and interactions of the spot and futures prices data. Likewise, qualitatively comparable results are obtained when using our expanded dataset. However, a number of important qualitative differences from Chang and Lee arise in terms of the analysis of causality between spot and futures contract prices. As part of our replication exercise we also investigate some aspects that were not originally considered by Chang and Lee. In doing this, we find that both the variability of futures prices as well as the speed of adjustment of futures/spot price differentials increase as the maturity of the contracts increase.     

Price discovery in energy markets

In this study, we empirically analyze the price discovery process in the futures and spot markets for crude oil, heating oil and natural gas using daily closing prices. We use two different information share measures that are based on the methods proposed by Gonzalo and Granger (1995) and Lien and Shrestha (2014). Both measures indicate that almost all the price discovery takes place in the futures markets for the heating oil and natural gas. However, for the crude oil, the price discovery takes place both in the futures and spot markets. As a whole, our study indicates that futures markets play an important role in the price discovery process.     

The role of trader positions in spot and futures prices for WTI

We extend the analysis of causal relations between trader positions and oil prices and the process of price discovery by estimating a cointegrating vector autoregression (CVAR) model that expands the cash-and-carry relation between spot and futures prices to quantify long- and short-run relations among oil prices, trader positions, interest rates, and oil inventories. Results indicate that oil inventories and trader positions are needed to generate cointegration between spot and futures prices. The presence of trader positions and oil inventories suggest that both play a role in price discovery. Furthermore, the cointegrating relation for price loads into the equation for both oil prices and trader positions. This suggests a bi-directional simultaneous adjustment process between oil prices and trader positions. This expands the unidirectional causal relation from oil prices to trader positions that is generated by previous studies. Additional results suggest that price discovery occurs in the market for heavily traded near-month futures contracts, but discovery for thin far-month futures markets occurs in the spot market. Together, these results suggest mechanisms by which speculation could affect oil prices but the results presented here are moot regarding their effects.     

Causalities between CO2, electricity,and other energy variables during phase I and phase II of the EU ETS

The topic of this article is the analysis of the interplay between daily carbon, electricity and gas price data with the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) for CO₂ emissions. In a first step we have performed Granger causality tests for Phase I of the EU ETS (January 2005 until December 2007) and the first year of Phase II of the EU ETS (2008). The analysis includes both spot and forward markets—given the close interactions between the two sets of markets. The results show that during Phase I coal and gas prices, through the clean dark and spark spread, impacted CO₂ futures prices, which in return Granger caused electricity prices. During the first year of the Phase II, the short-run rent capture theory (in which electricity prices Granger cause CO₂ prices) prevailed. On the basis of the qualitative results of the Granger causality tests we obtained the formulation testable equations for quantitative analysis. Standard OLS regressions yielded statistically robust and theoretically coherent results.     

Revisiting the relationship between spot and futures oil prices: Evidence from quantile cointegrating regression

Since most real decisions depend upon current market states or whether it is advantageous to the participants themselves, this paper revisits the relationship between spot and futures oil prices of West Texas Intermediate covering 1986 to 2009 with an innovative approach named quantile cointegration. Different to previous perspectives, we target the issues of cointegrating relationships, causalities, and market efficiency based on different market states under different maturities of oil futures. In our empirical analysis, except for market efficiency, long-run cointegrating relationships and causalities between spot and futures oil prices have significant differentials among futures maturities and the performances of spot oil markets. Furthermore, the response of spot prices to shocks in 1-month futures oil prices is much steeper in high spot prices than in low spot prices. This phenomenon is consistent with the prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), in that the value function is generally steeper for losses than for gains.     

Improving market place efficiency in the non-oil energy sectors

Oil sector markets have long been acclaimed as being efficient. Modern technology now allows the markets of non-oil energy sectors to become similar to oil sector markets in the use of ‘spot’ pricing, closely related buying, buy-back and re-selling prices, buying fuels and energy forwards, futures markets in fuels and energy, agents and brokers. Using these means, the non-oil energy sector markets can now be made more efficient, leading to reduced energy sector costs and therefore reduced energy prices. This topic will be fully explored in a special issue of Energy Policy to be published in August 1988.     

A novel market efficiency index for energy futures and their term structure risk premiums

This paper proposes a novel futures market efficiency index which aggregates the efficiencies of futures contracts across their term structure spanning from one month to 12 months. The index measures the ability for price discovery of a long-term futures contract on its nearby short-term contract consistently across its terms. The index uses a recently developed futures market efficiency test which accounts for heteroscedastic prices and time-varying risk premiums. It simultaneously estimates the term premiums of futures, providing valuable information for the investor. The proposed index is employed to investigate the efficiencies of four major energy commodities, namely, crude oil, natural gas, heating oil, and gasoil during the sample period 1990–2016. Numerical results indicate that the market efficiencies vary across terms and across energy commodities. Gasoil futures traded on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) are the most efficient and natural gas futures are the least efficient in prices. The spillover dynamics of market risk information across futures markets are investigated using conditionally heteroscedastic common factors (CHCFs) extracted for each commodity using the estimated term premiums. There exist significant delayed, contemporaneous, and potential information spillovers among term premiums of the energy commodities in our sample. Our findings are robust and they can help investors to optimally diversify their portfolios.     

Investor attention and crude oil prices: Evidence from nonlinear Granger causality tests

Using the Google search volume index (GSVI) to measure investor attention, this paper investigates the relationships between investor attention and crude oil prices for the main crude oil markets worldwide. To account for possible structural breaks and nonlinearity in the relation between investor attention and oil returns, Fourier unit root test and nonlinear Granger causality tests are employed. The empirical results suggest that the bidirectional nonlinear Granger causality exists only between investor attention and WTI future crude oil return. However, WTI crude oil return Granger-causes investor attention weakly. For Dubai spot, Daqing spot, WTI spot and Brent future oil markets, unidirectional nonlinear Granger causality runs from investor attention to oil returns, which is relatively weak.     

World oil prices,precious metal prices and macroeconomy in Turkey

We examine the long- and short-run transmissions of information between the world oil price, Turkish interest rate, Turkish lira–US dollar exchange rate, and domestic spot gold and silver price. We find that the world oil price has no predictive power of the precious metal prices, the interest rate or the exchange rate market in Turkey. The results also show that the Turkish spot precious metals, exchange rate and bond markets do not also provide information that would help improve the forecasts of world oil prices in the long run. The findings suggest that domestic gold is also considered a safe haven in Turkey during devaluation of the Turkish lira, as it is globally. It is interesting to note that there does not seem to be any significant influence of developments in the world oil markets on Turkish markets in the short run either. However, transitory positive initial impacts of innovations in oil prices on gold and silver markets are observed. The short-run price transmissions between the world oil market and the Turkish precious metal markets have implications for policy makers in emerging markets and both local and global investors in the precious metals market and the oil market.     

What happens to the relationship between EU allowances prices and stock market indices in Europe?

The stock market may reflect the economic conditions of an economy and a positive economic situation is expected to improve the companies' profits, which makes company shares more attractive since the expected dividends to shareholders will be larger. Theoretically, higher economic activity leads to higher energy demand and, consequently, higher carbon emissions, which give rise to higher EU allowances (EUA) prices. Therefore, the stock market and EUA prices seem to be connected, with causality going from the stock markets to EUA prices. This paper formally tests for it, showing that the causality effectively runs from the stock market to the European Climate Exchange market. Furthermore, the paper studies the effects of the evolution of European stock markets on the EUA spot prices.     

Gold and oil futures markets: Are markets efficient?

In this paper we examine the long-run relationship between gold and oil spot and futures markets. We draw on the conceptual framework that when oil price rises, it creates inflationary pressures, which instigate investments in gold as a hedge against inflation. We test for the long-run relationship between gold and oil futures prices at different maturity and unravel evidence of cointegration. This implies that: (a) investors use the gold market as a hedge against inflation and (b) the oil market can be used to predict the gold market prices and vice versa, thus these two markets are jointly inefficient, at least for the sample period considered in this study.     

Nonparametric modeling of carbon prices

This paper constitutes the first exercise of nonparametric modeling applied to carbon markets. The framework of analysis is carefully detailed, and the empirical application unfolds in the case of BlueNext spot and ECX futures prices. The data is gathered in daily frequency from April 2005 to April 2010. First, we document the presence of strong nonlinearities in the conditional mean functions. Second, the conditional volatility functions reveal an asymmetric and heteroskedastic behavior which is dramatically different between carbon spot and futures logreturns. The results for spot prices are also robust to subsamples' decomposition. Third, we show in an out-of-sample forecasting exercise that nonparametric modeling allows reducing the prediction error by almost 15% compared to linear AR models. This latter result is confirmed by the Diebold–Mariano pairwise test statistic.     

Time-frequency causality and connectedness between international prices of energy,food, industry,agriculture and metals

This study analyzes the lead-lag relationship between the price indices of energy fuels and each of food, industrial inputs, agriculture raw materials, metals and beverages in the time-frequency domain. To this end, we first use the wavelet coherency and phase-differences. Next, we use the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) and Barunik and Krehlik (2017) spillover indices to analyse the connectedness among the set of the price indices under consideration. The period of the study is 1990m1 to 2017m5. The wavelet coherency results reveal that there are important and significant relations between the fuel and food prices, the fuel and industrial prices, and the fuel and metal prices. These results also show that there are phase relationships between those paired prices. The volatility spillover results indicate that the agricultural sector is the most affected by shocks from the other markets. The return series of the industrial input prices at all frequencies appears to be the main source of volatility transmission to the prices of the other commodities over the whole period. This finding underlines the relevance of the industrial inputs to policy makers, particularly when they design policies to provide incentives related to industrial production.     

Price formation in electricity forward markets and the relevance of systematic forecast errors

Since the liberalisation of the European electricity sector, forward and futures contracts have gained significant interest of market participants due to risk management reasons. For pricing of these contracts an important fact concerns the non-storability of electricity. In this case, according to economic theory, forward prices are related to the expected spot prices which are built on fundamental market expectations. In the following article the crucial impact parameters of forward electricity prices and the relationship between forward and future spot prices will be assessed by an empirical analysis of electricity prices at the European Energy Exchange and the Nord Pool Power Exchange. In fact, price formation in the considered markets is influenced by historic spot market prices yielding a biased forecasting power of long-term contracts. Although market and risk assessment measures of market participants and supply and demand shocks can partly explain the futures-spot bias inefficiencies in the analysed forward markets cannot be ruled out.