Risk management of stock index futures

The Hong Kong Hang Seng index futures is taken as a study object and a method of empirical analysis is adopted in order to verify the validity of the application of the value-at-risk (VaR) method in the risk measurement of the stock index futures market. The results suggest that under normal market conditions it is feasible to apply the VaR method in the measurement of the market risks of stock index futures. The daily VaR value of the stock index futures provides a foreseeable profit and loss of the stock index futures. Financial supervisors can adjust their supervising strategies according to the daily VaR value. The speculators can adjust risk capital reserve rates in the same way. The application of this method in China's stock index futures market requires the solutions to specific problems: the absence of historical data, the difficult confirmation of non-risk interest rates etc.

Cost-benefit analysis of trading strategies in the stock index futures market

With the introduction of many derivatives into the capital market,including stock index futures,the trading strategies in financial markets have been gradually enriched.However,there is still no theoretical model that can determine whether these strategies are effective,what the risks are,and how costly the strategies are.We built an agent-based cross-market platform that includes five stocks and one stock index future,and constructed an evaluation system for stock index futures trading strategies.The evaluation system includes four dimensions:effectiveness,risk,occupation of capital,and impact cost.The results show that the informed strategy performs well in all aspects.The risk of the technical strategy is relatively higher than that of the other strategies.Moreover,occupation of capital and impact cost are both higher for the arbitrage strategy.Finally,the wealth of noise traders is almost lost.

The Effect of Market Quality on the Causality between Returns and Volatilities: Evidence from CSI 300 Index Futures

This paper investigates the impact of market quality on volatility asymmetry of CSI 300 index futures by using short-and long-run causality measures proposed by Dufour et al.(2012).We use a high-frequency-based noise variance estimator as the comprehensive proxy for market quality and find that volatility asymmetry is closely related to market quality.Specifically,in the period of poor market quality,the volatility asymmetry will vanish or even be reversed,which is mainly due to the sharp decline of the leverage effects.Moreover,the volatility feedback effect will be enhanced while the leverage effect will be weakened if the noise variance is taken into consideration in the causal analysis.Finally,we use other market quality indices as auxiliary variables in the robustness analysis and get similar results.

Price Discovery Function of Index Futures in China: Evidence from Daily Closing Prices

Price discovery is one of the main functions of stock index futures.Using the daily closing prices of the CSI 300 index and its index futures from April 2010 to April 2012,this paper applies a vector error correction model(VECM)and an impulse response function to conduct an empirical analysis on the price discovery function of index futures in China.This paper has the following four findings:(1)a solid cointegration relationship between the CSI 300 index and its index futures exists in the long run;(2)when prices deviate from the longterm equilibrium,the stock index reverses weakly,while the reversal of index futures is much stronger;(3)the daily lead-lag relationship between the prices of the CSI 300 index and its index futures contracts is not significant in the short run;()shocks from the spot market have a lasting impact upon the futures market,but not vice versa,due to the limited short-term adjustment ability of the spot market.