Three Essays on Price Discovery in the Cotton Futures Market

Three Essays on Price Discovery in the Cotton Futures Market
Author: Joseph Peter Janzen
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN: 9781303442872

Recent booms and busts in commodity prices have placed renewed scrutiny on commodity futures markets as a mechanism for price discovery, the process of incorporating new information about the relative scarcity of the commodity into prices. Such concerns are not new; there has been some distrust of futures market price discovery since the inception of these markets. As these markets evolve, new market participants and institutions may influence price discovery. Using the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) cotton futures market as a laboratory, I consider three such forces potentially responsible for poor price discovery during the 2007-2011 period of volatile cotton prices. These are financial speculation, electronic trading, and funding constraints on commercial hedgers. In Chapter 1, I study whether the increased presence of financial firms, particularly commodity index traders, drives cotton futures prices away from the levels implied by supply and demand under rational expectations. I estimate a structural vector autoregression model of the cotton futures market. My model develops a new method to point identify shocks to precautionary demand for cotton separately from shocks to current supply and demand and separately identifies the effects of two types of speculation: precautionary demand for the commodity and financial speculation. I show empirically that most cotton price variation stems from contemporaneous unanticipated shocks to current cotton supply and demand. However, the 2008 price spike came from an increase in precautionary demand due to projections of lower future production. I find no evidence in support of claims that financial speculation causes commodity booms and busts.Chapter 2 considers the introduction of electronic trading to the cotton futures market across three periods of floor trade, parallel floor and electronic trade, and electronic-only trade. I statistically decompose intraday variation in cotton prices into a component related to information about market fundamentals and a ''pricing error'' caused by frictions in the trading mechanism. Better market quality or price discovery is characterized by lower variance of the pricing error. Unlike previous studies of floor and electronic trading, I consider more than average measures of market quality. I calculate statistics for market quality for each trading day, and study their trend, variance, persistence, and relationship to other variables related to price discovery. I find that market quality improved, but became more variable under electronic trading. This relationship between electronic trading and market quality is robust to controls for changes over time in the number of trades, trading volume, and price volatility.My final chapter considers the role of funding constraints in exacerbating futures price spikes. I review the experience of commercial hedgers during the 2008 cotton futures price spike. In this period, commercial hedgers without access to credit were forced to close futures positions in an illiquid market. Losses incurred on these trades led some firms to exit the cotton merchandising business. I use facts from the cotton case to develop a dynamic model of futures market equilibrium in the short-run for cases where funding constraints for some hedging firms bind and do not bind. Analytical results show that observed futures price volatility can be explained by the relation between funding liquidity of trading firms and market liquidity. This relationship alters the trading behavior of hedgers and results in diminished price discovery.

Essays on Trading Strategy

Essays on Trading Strategy
Author: Graham L Giller
Publisher: Giller Investments (New Jersey), LLC
Total Pages: 83
Release: 2021-12-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Following on from his Adventures in Financial Data Science, Graham Giller, one of Wall Streets original data scientists, collects together a set of pieces on optimal trading strategy design. These address the key issue not answered in the first volume of the series on Financial Data Science, how to go from an alpha to a trade. The division of topics is shaped by what Graham calls "Peter Muller's Rule": the analysis of systems to predict prices and systems to trade from predictions should be separated. This makes trading strategy agnostic as to the origins of the information contained within the alpha and clarifies the analytical methodology developed.

Essays on Applied Mircoeconomics and Finance

Essays on Applied Mircoeconomics and Finance
Author: Fei Song (Ph. D.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 studies the effect of online review manipulations on review systems. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are co-authored with Ali Kakhbod and focus on post-trade transparency in dynamic over-the-counter markets. Chapter 4 is co-authored with Umut Dur, Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez and studies the effect of the Taiwan mechanism, a mechanism that allocates high school seats to applicants. Chapter 1 shows that the conventional impression holds in the short-run that review manipulation makes review systems less informative. In the long-run, however., a manipulated review system can contain the same level of information as an un-manipulated counterpart. I develop a dynamic programming model with fixed product quality and naive buyers who are unaware of manipulation. I then extend it to consider endogenous product quality and sophisticated buyers. I also identify an unexpected effect of a policy to target sellers and check for manipulation. Chapter 2 studies how mandatory transparency (through TRACE), along with the long-term incentive of informed dealers, affects market price informativeness, liquidity and welfare in dynamic over-the-counter (OTC) markets. We show that the public disclosure of additional information about past trades, paradoxically, makes the markets more opaque, by reducing the market price informativeness. Thus, surprisingly, transparency requirements such as U.S. Dodd-Frank Act may make markets more opaque. However, this market opacity creates liquidity and increases welfare. To enhance financial transparency and improve the price informativeness as well as the market liquidity and welfare, an effective approach is to randomly audit dealers. Chapter 3 then studies how public disclosure of past trade details affects price discovery dynamics under asymmetric information with heterogenous hedging motives. We model that an informed buyer (informed trader) sequentially trades with a series of uninformed sellers (hedgers). The informed buyer is forward-looking and risk-neutral, and uninformed sellers are myopic and heterogeneously risk-averse. We discover that sellers' price discovery over the underlying fundamentals is crucially affected by what they can observe about past trade details. Specifically, (i) post-trade price transparency delays price discovery, but once it happens, it is always perfect. (ii) In contrast, when only past order information is available, price discovery can never be perfect, and can even be in the wrong direction. (iii) The availability of past trade details, paradoxically, makes it easier for the informed buyer to hide her private information and offer opaque prices. We establish that, under some minor regularity conditions, our equilibrium characterization achieves the maximal degree of ignorance among all pure-strategy PBE. Hence, this chapter can be viewed as a worst case analysis for regulators who care about market transparency. Moreover, we show that our findings are robust when the informed party's bargaining power decreases along the length of past trade history. Finally, we extend our results to the case where the informed buyer has a non-zero outside option, and the case where both parties switch their trading positions. Chapter 4 analyzes the properties of the Taiwan mechanism, used for high school placement nationwide starting in 2014. In the Taiwan mechanism, points are deducted from an applicant's score with larger penalties for lower ranked choices. Deduction makes the mechanism a new hybrid between the well-known Boston and deferred acceptance mechanisms. Our analysis sheds light on why Taiwan's new mechanism has led to massive nationwide demonstrations and why it nonetheless still remains in use.

Automating the Price Discovery Process

Automating the Price Discovery Process
Author: Mr.Ian Domowitz
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 38
Release: 1992-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Automated trade execution systems are examined with respect to the degree to which they automate the price discovery process. Seven levels of automation of price discovery are identified, and 47 systems are classified according to these criteria. Systems operating at various levels of automation are compared with respect to age, geographical location, and type of securities traded. Information provided to market participants, and asymmetries of information between traders with direct access to the automated market and outside investors also are examined. It is found, for example, that the degree of asymmetric information increases with the level of automation of price discovery. The potential for trading abuses related to prearranged trading, noncompetitive execution, and trading ahead of customers is analyzed for each level of automation. Certain levels of automation widen the opportunities for trading abuses in some respects, but may narrow them in others.

Essay on Price Overreaction and Price Limits in Emerging Markets

Essay on Price Overreaction and Price Limits in Emerging Markets
Author: Hisham Farag Omar
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the short and long-term overreaction phenomenon in the Egyptian stock market. In addition, the thesis investigates links between stock market regulatory policies (price limits and circuit breakers) and the profitability of contrarian strategies. Finally, the study examines the effect of regime switch - from strict price limits to circuit breakers - on the volatility spillover, delayed price discovery and trading interference hypotheses. Using data from the Egyptian stock exchange, I find that a panel data approach adds a new dimension to the existing models, offers interesting additional insights and reveals the importance of the role of unobservable firm-specific factors in addition to observable factors in the analysis of the overreaction phenomenon. Moreover, portfolios based on unobserved factors i.e. management quality, corporate governance and political connections of board members, significantly outperform traditional portfolios based on size. Results also show evidence of genuine long-term overreaction phenomenon in the Egyptian stock market as the contrarian profits of the arbitrage portfolio cannot be attributed to the small firm effect, formation period length, and stability of time varying factor or seasonality effect. Finally, switching from a strict price limit to a circuit breakers regime increases stock price volatility and disrupts the price discovery mechanism in the Egyptian stock market.

Three Essays on Trading Behavior

Three Essays on Trading Behavior
Author: Adam Daniel Clark-Joseph
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation analyzes trading behavior in financial markets from multiple perspectives. In chapter 1, "Exploratory Trading," I investigate the mechanisms underlying high-frequency traders' capacity to profitably anticipate price movements. I develop a model of how a trader could gather valuable private information by using her own orders in an exploratory manner to learn about market conditions. The model's predictions are borne out empirically, and I find that this "exploratory trading" model helps to resolve several central open questions about high-frequency trading. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the trading behavior of individuals. Chapter 2, "Foundations of the Disposition Effect: Experimental Evidence," (co-authored with Johanna Mollerstrom), presents and analyzes results from a laboratory experiment intended to examine if and how "regret aversion"--aversion to admitting mistakes--affects people's trading decisions. Although the experimental results resolve little about regret aversion specifically, they reveal some novel and unexpected effects, most importantly that subjects radically changed their trading decisions when they were compelled to devote a minimal amount of extra attention. In chapter 3, "Price Targets," I analyze how rational investors who privately observe information of indeterminate quality use prices to learn about whether or not their private information is valuable. I derive implications about trading behavior that not only help to explain a variety of empirical puzzles, but also generate several new testable predictions. Although these three essays differ considerably in methodology and focus, they all address the same basic issue of understanding the foundations of trading behavior.

Behavioral Finance

Behavioral Finance
Author: Lucy F. Ackert
Publisher: South Western Educational Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Investments
ISBN: 9780538752862

The book begins by building upon the established, conventional principles of finance that you've have already learned in your principles course. The authors then move into psychological principles of behavioral finance, including heuristics and biases, overconfidence, emotion and social forces. You immediately see how human behavior influences the decisions of individual investors and professional finance practitioners, managers, and markets. You also gain a strong understanding of how social forces impact individuals' choices. The book clearly explains what behavioral finance indicates about observed market outcomes as well as how psychological biases potentially impact the behavior of managers. The book's solid academic approach provides opportunities for you to utilize theory and complete applications in every chapter as you learn the implications of behavioral finance on retirement, pensions, education, debiasing, and client management. The book spends a significant amount of time examining how today's practitioners can use behavioral finance to further their professional success.