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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. In particular, the
focus of the paper is to test of whether the increasing presence of financialization of
commodity trading in futures markets mentioned in the literature have made them
divorced from the physical markets. A multivariate GARCH model was applied to
compute optimal hedging ratios. Important evidence was found of an improvement,
after 2007, in the effectiveness of hedging with the European futures.