Short-term contrarian and sentiment by traders’ types on futures markets

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the interaction between sentiments and past prices can lead to higher abnormal profit in futures markets. Such examinations allow the authors to relate the paper to the debate that focuses on examining the behavior of different types of traders in futures market, and who among these traders destabilize the markets. Design/methodology/approach - First, the authors develop new dynamic strategies in US futures market that combine sentiment by type of traders based on trader position provided by the Disaggregated Commitments of Traders with short-term contrarian signals. Next, the authors adjust the abnormal profits to the CAPM model and Miffre and Rallis’s (2007) model. Finally, the authors use the Du (2012) decomposition methodology. Findings - The main findings are that the abnormal profit is more pronounced when the authors combine past returns with lagged high producer/merchant/processor/user or low managed money sentiment. The results from swap dealer or other reportable groups show that there is no pervasive directional relation between their sentiment and contrarian profit. A further investigation of the sources of abnormal profits demonstrates that these profits survive even after the adjustment of obtained return to risk. Instead, these profits are mainly due to the overreaction to the news by irrational traders. Originality/value - Based on behavioral finance theories, the authors conclude that producer, merchant, processor and user behave like irrational traders, while managed money traders behave like rational ones. Given that current regulatory proposes the limitation of speculation, the policy implications of these results are important. Therefore, these findings suggest that policy distinctions on trading motives may be more challenging to construct than ever.