Physical Delivery Versus Cash Settlement: An Empirical Study on the Feeder Cattle Contract

This paper investigates the effects of the switch from physical delivery to cash settlement on the behavior of the cash and futures prices of the feeder cattle contract traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A bivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model is a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: TSE, Yiu Kuen, Lien, Donald
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2002
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/397
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:This paper investigates the effects of the switch from physical delivery to cash settlement on the behavior of the cash and futures prices of the feeder cattle contract traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A bivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model is applied to estimate the conditional volatility structure, with a possible structural break due to the switch to cash settlement. The results show that the volatility of the futures prices (but not the cash prices) declined after physical delivery was replaced by cash settlement. In terms of futures hedging, cash settlement led to smaller and more stable hedge ratios. The variance of the hedged portfolio also decreased substantially. The evidence suggests that cash settlement is beneficial to the feeder cattle futures market.