Asymptotic Dependence and Its Impact on Hedging Effectiveness: An Examination of Stock, Currency, and Commodity Futures

Abstract

This study measures the asymptotic dependence between spot and futures losses and investigates its impact on hedging effectiveness using data from stock, currency, and commodity markets. The findings reveal that stock futures contracts show strong asymptotic dependence, while currency futures have weak asymptotic dependence and most commodity futures lack asymptotic dependence with the underlying spots. Further, stock futures have the highest hedging effectiveness, while commodity and currency futures show low hedging effectiveness for downside risk. Results also suggest that asymptotic dependence is critical for minimum-variance hedging. Asymptotic dependence increases with the hedging horizon, leading to a better hedging performance of the futures. It also appears that the hedging strategies sensitive to asymptotic dependence perform better than the competing models. The results for the entire period and the subsample periods offer similar conclusions.