Exploiting the sentiments: A simple approach for improving cross hedging effectiveness

This paper introduces a novel hedging strategy based on textual information for cross-hedging. The strategy allows the optimal hedge ratio to vary with the sentiment extracted from online oil news, leading to an improvement in cross-hedging effectiveness. We find that the sentiment hedging strategy outperforms traditional time-varying and static hedging strategies in both in-sample and out-of-sample scenarios, with statistical and economic significance. This superior performance benefits from the well-documented predictive power of sentiment on futures volatility. Furthermore, we confirm an asymmetric effect of sentiment on hedging effectiveness, with negative sentiment having a greater impact on hedge ratios. Finally, extreme sentiment can trade off the negative relationship between volatile hedge ratios and hedging performance, potentially leading to superior hedging performance compared to normal sentiment, which is robust when considering transaction costs. Our findings highlight the importance of sentiment for estimating the optimal hedge ratio and should be considered for risk management.