IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/anc/wpaper/394.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are Futures Prices Influenced by Spot;Prices or Vice-versa? An Analysis of Crude;Oil, Natural Gas and Gold Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Mihaela NICOLAU

    (Danubius University, Galati, Romania)

  • Giulio PALOMBA

    (Universit… Politecnica delle Marche, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali)

  • Ilaria TRAINI

    ([n.a.])

Abstract

Considering the financial theory based on cost-of-carry model, a futures contract price is always influenced by the spot price of its underlying asset, as long as the futures price is determined as the sum of the underlying asset's spot price and its cost of carrying or storing. The aim of this paper is to verify if there are dynamic connections between spot and futures prices as statued by the cost-of-carry model, and to identify the direction of causality.;The empirical analysis is conducted on three different commodity markets, namely crude oil, natural gas and gold. We estimate a battery of recursive bivariate VAR models over a sample of daily spot and futures prices ranging from January 1997 to September 2013. Using the recursive Grange-rcausality analysis, we show that some interactions between spot and futures prices clearly exist and they mainly depend on market type and futures contract's maturity.

Suggested Citation

  • Mihaela NICOLAU & Giulio PALOMBA & Ilaria TRAINI, 2013. "Are Futures Prices Influenced by Spot;Prices or Vice-versa? An Analysis of Crude;Oil, Natural Gas and Gold Markets," Working Papers 394, Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (I), Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali.
    • Handle: RePEc:anc:wpaper:394
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://docs.dises.univpm.it/web/quaderni/pdf/394.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2013
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arouri, Mohamed El Hédi & Lahiani, Amine & Lévy, Aldo & Nguyen, Duc Khuong, 2012. "Forecasting the conditional volatility of oil spot and futures prices with structural breaks and long memory models," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 283-293.
    2. Hammoudeh, Shawkat & Malik, Farooq & McAleer, Michael, 2011. "Risk management of precious metals," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 51(4), pages 435-441.
    3. Tully, Edel & Lucey, Brian M., 2007. "A power GARCH examination of the gold market," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 316-325, June.
    4. Ron Alquist & Lutz Kilian, 2010. "What do we learn from the price of crude oil futures?," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(4), pages 539-573.
    5. Arouri, Mohamed El Hedi & Hammoudeh, Shawkat & Lahiani, Amine & Nguyen, Duc Khuong, 2013. "On the short- and long-run efficiency of energy and precious metal markets," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 832-844.
    6. Moosa, Imad A. & Al-Loughani, Nabeel E., 1994. "Unbiasedness and time varying risk premia in the crude oil futures market," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 99-105, April.
    7. Menzie D. Chinn & Olivier Coibion, 2014. "The Predictive Content of Commodity Futures," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(7), pages 607-636, July.
    8. Chang, Chia-Lin & McAleer, Michael & Tansuchat, Roengchai, 2011. "Crude oil hedging strategies using dynamic multivariate GARCH," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(5), pages 912-923, September.
    9. Batten, Jonathan A. & Ciner, Cetin & Lucey, Brian M., 2010. "The macroeconomic determinants of volatility in precious metals markets," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 65-71, June.
    10. Alquist, Ron & Kilian, Lutz & Vigfusson, Robert J., 2013. "Forecasting the Price of Oil," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 427-507, Elsevier.
    11. Cartea, Álvaro & Williams, Thomas, 2008. "UK gas markets: The market price of risk and applications to multiple interruptible supply contracts," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 829-846, May.
    12. Root, Thomas H. & Lien, Donald, 2003. "Can modeling the natural gas futures market as a threshold cointegrated system improve hedging and forecasting performance?," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 117-133.
    13. Lee, Chien-Chiang & Zeng, Jhih-Hong, 2011. "Revisiting the relationship between spot and futures oil prices: Evidence from quantile cointegrating regression," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(5), pages 924-935, September.
    14. Herbert, John H, 1995. "Trading volume, maturity and natural gas futures price volatility," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 293-299, October.
    15. Hooi Hooi Lean & Michael McAleer & Wing-Keung Wong, 2010. "Market Efficiency of Oil Spot and Futures: A Stochastic Dominance Approach," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-705, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    16. Inoue, Atsushi & Rossi, Barbara, 2005. "Recursive Predictability Tests for Real-Time Data," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 23, pages 336-345, July.
    17. Hedi Arouri, Mohamed El & Khuong Nguyen, Duc, 2010. "Oil prices, stock markets and portfolio investment: Evidence from sector analysis in Europe over the last decade," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(8), pages 4528-4539, August.
    18. Park, Haesun & Mjelde, James W. & Bessler, David A., 2008. "Price interactions and discovery among natural gas spot markets in North America," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 290-302, January.
    19. Liu, Li & Wan, Jieqiu, 2011. "A study of correlations between crude oil spot and futures markets: A rolling sample test," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(21), pages 3754-3766.
    20. Tonn, Victor Lux & Li, H.C. & McCarthy, Joseph, 2010. "Wavelet domain correlation between the futures prices of natural gas and oil," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 408-414, November.
    21. Bekiros, Stelios D. & Diks, Cees G.H., 2008. "The relationship between crude oil spot and futures prices: Cointegration, linear and nonlinear causality," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(5), pages 2673-2685, September.
    22. Apostolos Serletis, 2007. "Rational Expectations, Risk, and Efficiency in Energy Futures Markets," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Quantitative And Empirical Analysis Of Energy Markets, chapter 2, pages 15-22, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    23. Elder, John & Miao, Hong & Ramchander, Sanjay, 2012. "Impact of macroeconomic news on metal futures," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 51-65.
    24. Lean, Hooi Hooi & McAleer, Michael & Wong, Wing-Keung, 2010. "Market efficiency of oil spot and futures: A mean-variance and stochastic dominance approach," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(5), pages 979-986, September.
    25. Hammoudeh, Shawkat & Araújo Santos, Paulo & Al-Hassan, Abdullah, 2013. "Downside risk management and VaR-based optimal portfolios for precious metals, oil and stocks," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 318-334.
    26. Hernandez, Manuel & Torero, Maximo, 2010. "Examining the dynamic relationship between spot and future prices of agricultural commodities," IFPRI discussion papers 988, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    27. Granger, C. W. J. & Newbold, Paul, 1986. "Forecasting Economic Time Series," Elsevier Monographs, Elsevier, edition 2, number 9780122951831 edited by Shell, Karl.
    28. Kao, Chung-Wei & Wan, Jer-Yuh, 2009. "Information transmission and market interactions across the Atlantic -- an empirical study on the natural gas market," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 152-161, January.
    29. Modjtahedi, Bagher & Movassagh, Nahid, 2005. "Natural-gas futures: Bias, predictive performance, and the theory of storage," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 617-637, July.
    30. West, Kenneth D & McCracken, Michael W, 1998. "Regression-Based Tests of Predictive Ability," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(4), pages 817-840, November.
    31. Buchanan, W. K. & Hodges, P. & Theis, J., 2001. "Which way the natural gas price: an attempt to predict the direction of natural gas spot price movements using trader positions," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 279-293, May.
    32. Johansen, Soren, 1991. "Estimation and Hypothesis Testing of Cointegration Vectors in Gaussian Vector Autoregressive Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(6), pages 1551-1580, November.
    33. Bopp, Anthony E. & Lady, George M., 1991. "A comparison of petroleum futures versus spot prices as predictors of prices in the future," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(4), pages 274-282, October.
    34. Pesaran, M. Hashem & Timmermann, Allan, 2007. "Selection of estimation window in the presence of breaks," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 137(1), pages 134-161, March.
    35. Mihaela Nicolau, 2012. "Do Spot Prices Move towards Futures Prices? A study on Crude Oil Market," Acta Universitatis Danubius. OEconomica, Danubius University of Galati, issue 5(5), pages 166-176, October.
    36. Daskalaki, Charoula & Skiadopoulos, George, 2011. "Should investors include commodities in their portfolios after all? New evidence," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(10), pages 2606-2626, October.
    37. Shafiee, Shahriar & Topal, Erkan, 2010. "An overview of global gold market and gold price forecasting," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 178-189, September.
    38. Herbert, John H., 1993. "The relation of monthly spot to futures prices for natural gas," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 18(11), pages 1119-1124.
    39. Ederington, Louis H. & Salas, Jesus M., 2008. "Minimum variance hedging when spot price changes are partially predictable," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(5), pages 654-663, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Donia Aloui & Stéphane Goutte & Khaled Guesmi & Rafla Hchaichi, 2020. "COVID 19's impact on crude oil and natural gas S&P GS Indexes," Working Papers halshs-02613280, HAL.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nicolau, Mihaela & Palomba, Giulio, 2015. "Dynamic relationships between spot and futures prices. The case of energy and gold commodities," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 130-143.
    2. Jena, Sangram Keshari & Tiwari, Aviral Kumar & Hammoudeh, Shawkat & Roubaud, David, 2019. "Distributional predictability between commodity spot and futures: Evidence from nonparametric causality-in-quantiles tests," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 615-628.
    3. Cagli, Efe Caglar & Taskin, Dilvin & Evrim Mandaci, Pınar, 2019. "The short- and long-run efficiency of energy, precious metals, and base metals markets: Evidence from the exponential smooth transition autoregressive models," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    4. Lang, Korbinian & Auer, Benjamin R., 2020. "The economic and financial properties of crude oil: A review," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    5. Ruan, Qingsong & Huang, Ying & Jiang, Wei, 2016. "The exceedance and cross-correlations between the gold spot and futures markets," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 463(C), pages 139-151.
    6. Miroslava Zavadska & Lucía Morales & Joseph Coughlan, 2018. "The Lead–Lag Relationship between Oil Futures and Spot Prices—A Literature Review," IJFS, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-22, October.
    7. Chen, Pei-Fen & Lee, Chien-Chiang & Zeng, Jhih-Hong, 2014. "The relationship between spot and futures oil prices: Do structural breaks matter?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 206-217.
    8. Naser, Hanan, 2016. "Estimating and forecasting the real prices of crude oil: A data rich model using a dynamic model averaging (DMA) approach," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 75-87.
    9. Mihaela Nicolau, 2012. "Do Spot Prices Move towards Futures Prices? A study on Crude Oil Market," Acta Universitatis Danubius. OEconomica, Danubius University of Galati, issue 5(5), pages 166-176, October.
    10. Xie, Xiaoyu & Zhu, Heliang, 2021. "The role of gold futures in mitigating the impact of economic uncertainty on spot prices: Evidence from China," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 56(C).
    11. Frankel, Jeffrey A., 2014. "Effects of speculation and interest rates in a “carry trade” model of commodity prices," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 88-112.
    12. El Hedi Arouri, Mohamed & Lahiani, Amine & Nguyen, Duc Khuong, 2015. "World gold prices and stock returns in China: Insights for hedging and diversification strategies," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 273-282.
    13. Onder Buberkoku, 2017. "Examining Energy Futures Market Efficiency Under Multiple Regime Shifts," International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy, Econjournals, vol. 7(6), pages 61-71.
    14. Wang, Yudong & Wu, Chongfeng, 2013. "Are crude oil spot and futures prices cointegrated? Not always!," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 641-650.
    15. Menzie D. Chinn & Olivier Coibion, 2014. "The Predictive Content of Commodity Futures," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(7), pages 607-636, July.
    16. Charfeddine, Lanouar & Khediri, Karim Ben & Mrabet, Zouhair, 2019. "The forward premium anomaly in the energy futures markets: A time-varying approach," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 600-615.
    17. Arouri, Mohamed El Hedi & Hammoudeh, Shawkat & Lahiani, Amine & Nguyen, Duc Khuong, 2012. "Long memory and structural breaks in modeling the return and volatility dynamics of precious metals," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(2), pages 207-218.
    18. Wang, Jianli & Qiu, Shushu & Yick, Ho Yin, 2022. "The influence of the Shanghai crude oil futures on the global and domestic oil markets," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 245(C).
    19. Hooi Hooi Lean & Michael McAleer & Wing-Keung Wong, 2013. "Risk-averse and Risk-seeking Investor Preferences for Oil Spot and Futures," Documentos de Trabajo del ICAE 2013-31, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico, revised Aug 2013.
    20. Junior, Peterson Owusu & Tiwari, Aviral Kumar & Padhan, Hemachandra & Alagidede, Imhotep, 2020. "Analysis of EEMD-based quantile-in-quantile approach on spot- futures prices of energy and precious metals in India," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Granger-Causality; commodity markets; recursive estimation; spot and futures prices;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C32 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes; State Space Models
    • C58 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Financial Econometrics
    • G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:anc:wpaper:394. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Maurizio Mariotti (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deancit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.