Seasonality patterns in tanker spot freight rate markets

The aim of this paper is to investigate the existence and nature of seasonality (deterministic or stochastic) in tanker freight markets and measure and compare it across sub-sectors and under different market conditions (expansionary and contractionary) for the period January 1978 to December 1996. The existence of stochastic seasonality is rejected for all freight series while results on deterministic seasonality indicate increases in rates in November and December and decreases in rates from January to April. Seasonality is found to be varying across markets depending on vessel size and market condition. Seasonality comparisons under different market conditions, an issue investigated for the first time in the econometrics literature using Markov Switching models, reveal that seasonal rate movements are more pronounced when the market is recovering compared to smaller changes when the market is falling. This is well in line with the low and high elasticity of supply expected in expansionary and contractionary periods of shipping markets. The results have implications for tactical shipping operations such as budget planning, timing of dry-docking, vessel speed adjustments and repositioning. As expected, the out-of-sample forecasting performance of these Markov Regime Switching models is lacking somewhat, a result which is thought to be a consequence of having to predict ‘states’ simultaneously with mean values

Hedging ship price risk using freight derivatives in the drybulk market

We show that a fixed-maturity time-weighted Forward Freight Agreement (FFA) portfolio should be used to proxy the expected future earnings of a vessel. We investigate the corresponding hedging efficiency when using a portfolio of FFA prices to hedge ship price risk of both static hedge ratios calculated using Ordinary Least Squares estimation and the dynamic hedge ratios generated from a dynamic conditional correlation GARCH (1,1) model. We find that the hedging efficiency is greater for newer vessels than older vessels and that the static hedge ratio outperforms the dynamic hedge ratio. Our work is an extension of earlier empirical work which has only considered the hedging efficiency of varying-maturity calendar FFA contracts for a single vessel age.publishedVersio

The dynamics of time-varying volatilities in different size second-hand ship prices of the dry-cargo sector

This paper examines the dynamics of conditional volatilities in the world dry-bulk market for second-hand ships. In particular, it models and compares volatility estimates between different size vessels using monthly data. The recently developed class of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) models are utilized for this purpose. It is found that broadly speaking prices of small vessels are less volatile than larger ones, and the nature of these volatilities vary across sizes. Panamax volatilities are mostly driven by old 'news', while new shocks are more important for Handysize and Capesize volatilities. Furthermore, conditional volatilities of Handysize and Panamax prices are positively related to interest rates and Capesize to time-charters.