[PDF] The Role Of Speculation In Oil Markets eBook

Author : Samya Beidas-Strom
Publisher : International Monetary Fund
Page : 34 pages
File Size : 47,91 MB
Release : 2014-12-12
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1498333486

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How much does speculation contribute to oil price volatility? We revisit this contentious question by estimating a sign-restricted structural vector autoregression (SVAR). First, using a simple storage model, we show that revisions to expectations regarding oil market fundamentals and the effect of mispricing in oil derivative markets can be observationally equivalent in a SVAR model of the world oil market à la Kilian and Murphy (2013), since both imply a positive co-movement of oil prices and inventories. Second, we impose additional restrictions on the set of admissible models embodying the assumption that the impact from noise trading shocks in oil derivative markets is temporary. Our additional restrictions effectively put a bound on the contribution of speculation to short-term oil price volatility (lying between 3 and 22 percent). This estimated short-run impact is smaller than that of flow demand shocks but possibly larger than that of flow supply shocks.

Author : Robert Cavender
Publisher :
Page : 17 pages
File Size : 42,44 MB
Release : 2014
Category :
ISBN :

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Oil speculators take a lot of flak for the supposed "damage" they cause to the oil market and the economy as a whole. Price manipulation by speculators has been blamed for nearly all of the woes of our recent energy crisis. However, by transferring risk from producers to individuals who specialize in risk, futures markets in fact act to reduce the price variance that producers face in the market. This allows firms to produce oil on a much less sporadic basis, allowing for more stable prices for consumers. Speculation thus acts to calm the market, not to upset it. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the introduction of an oil futures market affects the supply volatility of that commodity. I find that following the emergence of the futures market in oil, the volatility of oil production drops significantly from then on, even when controlling for varying factors.

Author : Michael Hall Yan
Publisher :
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 25,34 MB
Release : 2012
Category :
ISBN :

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This paper is intended to better understand the effects of speculation on crude oil prices. While speculation has many benefits such as increasing market liquidity and bearing market risks that other wish to offset, speculation can also create unwanted market volatility and economic bubbles. During the past decade, crude oil prices have been extremely volatile causing increased controversy between investors and regulators regarding the role that oil speculation has played in the price of crude oil. This report examines the relationship between crude oil spot and futures prices to determine the role arbitragers, speculators, and hedgers have had in crude oil pricing.

Author : Thomas Hoehl
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
Page : 85 pages
File Size : 11,2 MB
Release : 2011-11-04
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 3656047677

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Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 8,0, Maastricht University (School of Business and Economics), language: English, abstract: This study finds that while a large part of the variation in crude oil futures prices is driven by fundamental factors, financial investment and speculation has the potential to aggravate reactions to changing fundamental variables and furthermore move prices on its own. The evidence is gathered by performing linear regressions and Granger Causality tests on futures returns, position data of different categories of futures traders on the New York Mercantile Exchange and proxies for relevant fundamental factors such as equity and exchange rate returns gathered from August 2006 to December 2010. While higher prices for crude oil naturally come along with increasing physical demand and finite world supply, future regulation might temper market volatility and guarantee that prices reflect a sustainable physical market equilibrium. The study also gives an overview of commodity market regulation and position limits on futures markets.

Author : Yan Hu
Publisher :
Page : 109 pages
File Size : 38,88 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Futures market
ISBN : 9781369681000

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When the crude oil price rocketed to $147 per barrel in July 2008 and then dropped to as low as $30 per barrel in December 2008, it catalyzed a hot debate about the factors of oil price fluctuations. A large number of papers argue that the main driver of the oil price fluctuations from 2003 to 2008 was due to economic fundamentals in the form of rapidly growing oil demand with stagnant oil supply. However, a different view is that speculation in the oil futures market caused the oil price to drift away from the level justified by the fundamental market forces of demand and supply because a large amount of investment flowed to the oil futures market during this period. This dissertation links the oil financial and spot markets through the oil futures-spot price spread and investigates if the financial activity in the oil futures market plays a critical role in oil spot price fluctuations between 2003 and 2008. In addition, this dissertation also discusses the recent oil price drop since July 2014 and studies whether the main driver of this recent oil price change is similar to that of the oil price change in 2008. ☐ Unlike other related literature that uses standard structural VAR, this dissertation applies a Time Varying Parameter Vector Autoregression (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatilities that can capture both time-varying relationships between economic aggregates and time-varying impacts of different oil shocks. This approach disentangles the oil financial speculation shock from economic fundamental shocks. In the meantime, the findings of the TVP-VAR model are compared with those of the Bayesian VAR with stochastic volatilities (BVAR-SV) model, a benchmark model in this dissertation, to see if incorporating time-varying coefficients in the model can give better results. The results of the comparison show that the time variations in coefficients are insignificant and imposing time varying coefficients in the model not only increases the estimation computation work load but also affects the model’s estimation accuracy. Therefore, the conclusion in this dissertation comes from the results of the BVAR-SV model. The results imply that the large proportion of the oil price changes from 2003 to 2008 can be explained by the oil demand shock but this proportion has been decreasing since 2005. In addition, the contribution of the oil financial speculation shock has increased substantially in recent years. In sum, the main driver of oil price change is oil demand from 2003 to 2008, whereas the main driver from 2014 to 2015 is oil financial speculation in the oil futures market.