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The impact of fundamental and financial traders on the term structure of oil

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  • Heidorn, Thomas
  • Mokinski, Frieder
  • Rühl, Christoph
  • Schmaltz, Christian

Abstract

We study how the exposure of fundamental and financial traders affects the futures curve of WTI oil and the market integration between WTI and Brent as measured by their price spread. To obtain a parsimonious representation of the futures curve, we decompose it into a level-, a slope- and a curvature factor. In a second step, we separately regress each extracted factor on measures of the market exposure of fundamental and financial traders revealing whether and how the exposure of the two trader groups affects the different dimensions of the futures curve. Spanning from 2006 until 2012, our dataset covers sub-periods of a sharp WTI-price rise as well as a diverging Brent-WTI-spread. Our contribution is threefold: First, we suggest that it is important to distinguish between level and slope as we find that fundamental traders have a measurable impact on the level of the futures curve, but do not play much of a role for its slope or curvature, whereas the exposure of financial traders mainly influences the slope of the futures curve. Despite allegations to the contrary, we find no evidence of a systematic impact of non-fundamental traders on the level of the futures curve, for example during the 2006-2008 oil price surge. Second, we suggest using relative short- and relative long positions for fundamental and financial traders instead of the net position as the former reflect better the overall group exposure and yield more significant results. Third, we find that the exposure of financials is the key driver of the Brent-WTI spread. It confirms that financial rather than fun-damental traders are responsible for integrating the two markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Heidorn, Thomas & Mokinski, Frieder & Rühl, Christoph & Schmaltz, Christian, 2014. "The impact of fundamental and financial traders on the term structure of oil," Frankfurt School - Working Paper Series 209, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:fsfmwp:209
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Michael Grote & Dariusz Wojcik & Matthew Zook, 2024. "Sticky substance with sticky power: Oil in global production and financial networks," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(2), pages 436-453, March.
    2. van Huellen, Sophie, 2019. "Price discovery in commodity futures and cash markets with heterogeneous agents," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 1-13.
    3. van Huellen, Sophie, 2020. "Too much of a good thing? Speculative effects on commodity futures curves," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 47(C).
    4. Baruník, Jozef & Malinská, Barbora, 2016. "Forecasting the term structure of crude oil futures prices with neural networks," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 366-379.
    5. Oguzhan Cepni, Duc Khuong Nguyen, and Ahmet Sensoy, 2022. "News Media and Attention Spillover across Energy Markets: A Powerful Predictor of Crude Oil Futures Prices," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Special I).
    6. Lajos Horváth & Zhenya Liu & Curtis Miller & Weiqing Tang, 2024. "Breaks in term structures: Evidence from the oil futures markets," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(2), pages 2317-2341, April.
    7. Dirk G. Baur & Lee A. Smales, 2022. "Trading behavior in bitcoin futures: Following the “smart money”," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(7), pages 1304-1323, July.
    8. Liu, Li & Wang, Yudong & Wu, Chongfeng & Wu, Wenfeng, 2016. "Disentangling the determinants of real oil prices," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 363-373.
    9. Christina Anderl & Guglielmo Maria Caporale, 2024. "Functional Oil Price Expectations Shocks and Inflation," CESifo Working Paper Series 10998, CESifo.
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    11. Bredin, Don & O'Sullivan, Conall & Spencer, Simon, 2021. "Forecasting WTI crude oil futures returns: Does the term structure help?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 100(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    WTI; Price speculation; Oil price rise; Market Integration;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q40 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - General
    • G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing

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