There is much evidence in the literature that the volatility of asset returns, in particular those from stock markets, show evidence of an asymmetric response to good and bad news. This paper considers the impact of news on time varying hedges for financial futures. The models are compared with traditional time-invariant hedging models, and those generated from symmetric multivariate GARCH models. Our results show that an asymmetric model allowing the forecasted volatility of the cash and futures prices to be affected differently by good and bad news gives superior in-sample hedging performance. However, the simpler symmetric model yields results which are not inferior in a hold-out sample. A method for evaluating the models in a modern risk management framework is also presented, and again, the importance of allowing optimal hedge ratios to be both time-varying and asymmetric is demonstrated.
