Chaos in Natural Gas Futures?

Technical analysis using charting techniques to forecast future price trends can be difficult due to the volatile and unpredictable nature of futures market. Alternatively, the emergence of chaos theory seeks to find order in random looking futures price behavior. Hence, this paper tests for the presence of nonlinearity and chaos using the NYMEX 1 -month, 2-month, 3-month, and 6-month daily natural gas settlement prices, from April 1990 to September 1996. In doing so, we use the BDS statistic of Brock, Dechert, and Scheinkman (1987) for nonlinearity testing and then proceed to compute the Lyapunov spectra to determine to what degree futures data resemble a chaotic system. Although the results indicate the presence of nonlinearity, they fail to provide significant evidence of deterministic chaos.