How about selling commodity futures losers?

This paper explores the benefits of extending the investment universe to commodity futures, from the perspective of momentum traders. We find that the growth-optimal portfolio includes negative (positive) weights on commodity futures losers (stock winners). Motivated by this finding, we construct a joint momentum strategy, buying stock winners and selling commodity futures losers, and show that it generates an average monthly return of up to 1.91% and provides much lower skewness (0.04) and kurtosis (1.27) than a traditional stock momentum strategy. It also greatly improves profitability, especially in unfavorable market states, and thus effectively manages tail risk

Flow toxicity of high frequency trading and its impact on price volatility : evidence from the KOSPI 200 futures market

We examine the relation between high-frequency trading, flow toxicity, and short-term volatility during both normal and stressful periods. Using transaction data for the Korea Composite Stock Price Index 200 (KOSPI 200) futures, we find the Volume-Synchronized Probability of Informed Trading (VPIN) useful in measuring flow toxicity as it predicts short-term volatility effectively. We further show that high-frequency trading is negatively related to VPIN and short-term volatility during normal times but has a positive association during stressful periods. Finally, we advocate the use of bulk-volume classification (BVC) by presenting evidence that the initiator identified by BVC trades at more favorable prices than the true trade initiator

Basis-momentum strategies and ranking periods

We analyze basis-momentum, the difference between the past 12 months' momentum in first- and second-nearby futures contracts suggested by Boons and Prado (2018). Since basis-momentum is related to the slope and the curvature over the ranking period, we split the 12-month ranking period into three subperiods—the current month, the past five months, and the six months before the previous five months—and construct three basis-momentums with them. Our results show that these three basis-momentums differ substantially in predicting future returns and have different economic determinants, namely, imbalance in the supply and demand and volatility risk in financial markets

The best PIN model in the Korean stock market

We investigate the effectiveness of the original PIN model (Easley, Kiefer, O’Hara, and Paperman, 1996) and five variants of the adjusted PIN model (Duarte and Young, 2009) in the Korean stock market. Throughout the series of likelihood-ratio fitness tests, we find that the unrestricted version of the adjusted PIN model fits best in the Korean stock market dat

Which Trades Move Asset Prices? An Analysis of Futures Trading Data

This article examines the information content of trade size and investor performance in a unified framework, using the price contribution (PC) measure proposed by Barclay and Warner (1993). Several interesting results obtained through the analysis of a unique dataset of KOSPI200 futures are presented herein, as follows: (1) evidence is presented against the "stealth trading hypothesis," and it is claimed that medium-size trades are not more informative than trades of other sizes; (2) foreign institutions have an advantage over domestic investors in terms of information, and their investment performance is the best among all investor types; (3) domestic individuals cannot be considered homogeneous investors; and (4) although the PC of the trades by domestic institutions is relatively small on average, the domestic institutional investors outperform other investors at around the futures' maturity dates.investment performance, investor type, KOSPI200 futures, price contribution, trade size,

Volatility-managed commodity futures portfolios

This paper examines whether the volatility management suggested by Moreira and Muir to improve profitability in the equity market can generate significant benefits both in-sample and out-of-sample in commodity futures markets as well. The in-sample results show the significant success of volatility management from the 12-month momentum and market portfolio, but the out-of-sample results show that volatility management fails to improve real-time performance, which indicates that in-sample results are not obtainable for real-time investors in the commodity futures markets. To understand the failure of volatility management, we perform the simulation analysis and find that a negative risk-return relation seems to play a pivotal role in addition to strong volatility persistency to make volatility management successful

Can commodity futures risk factors predict economic growth?

This paper examines whether commodity futures risk factors can predict future economic growth. We test risk factors capturing various spot or term premia and find that only three factors capturing term premia on the basis-momentum, basis, and change in slope are robust predictors for future economic growth, especially for long horizons. Our findings highlight the importance of the term premia, rather than the spot premia on which the literature has mainly focused. Moreover, we find that possible explanations for predictability of commodity factors – the intertemporal asset pricing model and information diffusion explanation – are all inconsistent with our empirical results

Liquidity skewness premium

Risk-averse investors may dislike decrease of liquidity rather than increase of liquidity, and thus there can be asymmetric preference in variation of liquidity. In addition, investors are likely to avoid extreme illiquidity. This paper examines whether the skewness of an individual firm’s liquidity capturing asymmetric distribution of liquidity and extreme illiquidity is priced in the US stock market. Using the skewness of the daily price impact, we find that it is positively priced, and this positive relation is significant up to eight months after controlling for other effects. Moreover, we find our results remain significant with the skewness of alternative liquidity measures, i.e., dollar-volume, and turnover