Hedging Performance and Stock Market Liquidity : Evidence from the Taiwan Futures Market

This paper examines the impact of stock market liquidity on the hedging performance of stock index futures, and extends the conditional OLS model described by Miffre [Journal of Futures Markets 24 (2004) 945] by including stock market liquidity in the regression model. The empirical results indicate that information regarding stock market liquidity is useful in predicting the optimal hedge ratio under different market conditions. In a bear market, the conditional OLS model with stock market liquidity provides the best hedging performance for the out-of-sample period. Although the OLS model outperforms the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and conditional OLS models for the out-of-sample period in a bull market, the conditional OLS model with stock market liquidity outperforms the conditional OLS model without stock market liquidity in terms of downside risks (lower partial moment)