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Working Paper
Monetary policy surprises, positions of traders, and changes in commodity futures prices
Using futures data for the period 1990?2008, this paper finds evidence that expansionary monetary policy surprises tend to increase crude and heating oil prices, and contractionary monetary policy shocks increase gold and platinum prices. Our analysis uncovers substantial heterogeneity in the magnitude of this response to positive and negative surprises across different commodities and commodity groups. The results also suggest that the positions of futures traders for the metals and energy commodities strongly respond to monetary policy shocks. The adjustment of the net long positions of ...
Working Paper
Foreign exchange predictability during the financial crisis: implications for carry trade profitability
In this paper, we study the effectiveness of carry trade strategies during and after the financial crisis using a flexible approach to modeling currency returns. We decompose the currency returns into multiplicative sign and absolute return components, which exhibit much greater predictability than raw returns. We allow the two components to respond to currency-specific risk factors and use the joint conditional distribution of these components to obtain forecasts of future carry trade returns. Our results suggest that the decomposition model produces higher forecast and directional accuracy ...
Working Paper
The Response of Stock Market Volatility to Futures-Based Measures of Monetary Policy Shocks
In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the volatility risk premium, futures-trading volume, and leverage appear to contribute to a short-term increase in volatility, the longer-term dynamics of volatility are dominated by monetary policy's effect on fundamentals. The estimation results from a bivariate VAR-GARCH model suggest that the Fed does not ...