Hedging voyage charter rates on illiquid routes

Abstract

Freight prices are heterogeneous, and not all the routes have the same liquidity of spot or futures prices; therefore, sometimes there are problems related to one, or more, route hedges. In this paper, we develop a methodology to hedge the price risk of one route using other routes' futures contracts. The main result of this paper is that we can hedge, with a great fit, the price risk of one route using other routes' futures contracts. The hedging results obtained with our methodology outperform those obtained with standard simple regression procedures.