Information Memory and Pricing Efficiency of Futures Contracts

Kapil Gupta and Balwinder Singh
Additional contact information
Kapil Gupta: Kapil Gupta, ICFAI Business School (IBS-G), Gurgaon, Haryana, India, kapilfutures@gmail.com.
Balwinder Singh: Balwinder Singh, Department of Commerce and Business Management, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India, bksaini@gmail.com.

Journal of Emerging Market Finance, 2009, vol. 8, issue 2, 191-250

Abstract: The present study investigates the information dissemination efficiency of the Indian equity futures market. Daily log returns of all indices as well as individual stock futures contracts understudy have been found to be non-normal and responding asymmetrically to the information shocks. Volatility clustering in daily log returns of all indices and individual stock futures contracts has been identified, which suggests that Indian equity futures market is not an efficient price-discovery vehicle. In addition, the present study finds an evidence of leverage effect, which implies that traders assign more weightage to bad news, whereas, they cautiously react to positive news. Mean reversion in daily log returns of the Indian equity futures market further suggests that traders (especially retail traders) need to be overcautious while adding equity futures as leverage products in their portfolio because in a highly volatile market, framing a trading rule to earn super normal profit may be an easy task for big/institutional traders but may not be possible for small/uninformed traders.

Keywords: Price discovery; cost-of-carry; efficient market hypothesis; information asymmetry; conditional; heteroscedasticity; JEL Classification: D81; JEL Classification: D82; JEL Classification: G12; JEL Classification: G14; JEL Classification: N25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097265270900800205 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:emffin:v:8:y:2009:i:2:p:191-250

DOI: 10.1177/097265270900800205

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Emerging Market Finance from Institute for Financial Management and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().