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Abstract
The instability of commodity prices and the hypothesis that speculative behaviour was one of
its causes has brought renewed interest in futures markets. In this paper, the hedging
effectiveness of European and US wheat futures markets were studied to test whether they
were affected by the high price instability after 2007. Implicitly, this is a test of whether the
increasing presence of speculation in futures markets have made them divorced from the
physical markets. A multivariate GARCH model was applied to compute optimal hedging
ratios. No important evidence was found of a change in the effectiveness of hedging after
2007.