This paper investigates the optimal short-term hedging of Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) portfolios with index futures. Using daily data from May 2000 to December 2004 on the four largest passive ETFs (the Spider, the Diamond, the Cubes and the Russell iShare) and their corresponding index futures we examine the performance of minimum variance hedges for efficient variance reduction and for investors with exponential utility. Our findings relate to daily hedging based on OLS regression, exponentially weighted moving averages and ECM-GARCH models and the utility-based performance evaluation criterion is adopted to capture an efficient reduction in skewness and kurtosis as well as the variance. The basis risk on US equity indices is now extremely low and as a result we find no evidence that minimum variance hedge ratios outperform a naïve 1:1 futures hedge, either for individual ETFs or for portfolios of ETFs. Where minimum variance hedge ratios are useful is for the cross-hedging of ETFs, i.e. the netting of long-short positions prior to placing a futures hedge. We also find that hedging of an ETF portfolio with just one index future can be almost as effective as hedging with all the relevant index futures. Our results should be of interest to tax arbitrage investors in ETFs and their market makers, who often face large and heterogeneous creation and redemption demands on different ETFs. Both types of traders may consider hedging their positions overnight or over a few days.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Length: 31 pages Date of creation: Dec 2005 Date of revision: Publication status: Forthcoming in Journal of Banking and Finance Handle: RePEc:rdg:icmadp:icma-dp2005-16