Hedging positions in US wheat markets: a disaggregated data analysis

Purpose This study aims to spot wheat data and disaggregated commitment of trader data for CME traded wheat futures to examine the effect of exogenous shocks for hedging positions of Producers and Swap Dealers on cash-futures basis and excess futures returns. Design/methodology/approach A Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) methodology is used to capture volatility transfer effects. Findings Evidence is presented that institutional short hedging positions play a major role in the pricing of asymmetric information held by Swap Dealers into the basis. The results also indicate that producer hedging contains information when conditions in the supply chain create a shift in long vs short hedging demand. Finally, the results demonstrate that that Swap Dealer short hedging has the greatest effect on risk premium size and historical volatility. Originality/value Various proxies for spot prices are used in the literature, although actual spot price data is not common. In addition, stationarity for basis and open interest data is induced using the Baxter-King filter which allows us to work with levels, rather than percentage changes, in the time series data. This provides the ability to directly observe the effect of outright open interest positions for hedgers on contemporaneous innovations in basis and in excess returns. The use of a BVAR methodology represents an improvement over other structural VAR models by capturing contemporaneous systemic effects within an endogeneity based structural framework.