Price Discovery, Causality and Forecasting in the Freight Futures Market

This paper investigates the causal relationship between futures and spot prices in the freight futures market. Being a thinly traded market whose underlying asset is a service, sets it apart from other markets investigated so far in the literature. Causality tests, generalised impulse response analysis and forecasting performance evaluation indicate that futures prices tend to discover new information more rapidly than spot prices, which is in line with the empirical evidence from other markets. Sub-period results, corresponding to revisions in the composition of the underlying index, show that the price discovery role of futures prices has strengthened as a result of the more homogeneous composition of the index in the recent years. This also indicates that the restructuring of the underlying index in November 1999, to reflect trade flows which are homogeneous in terms of commodities and cargo sizes, may have a beneficial impact on the market. Finally, the information incorporated into futures prices, when formulated as a VECM, produces more accurate forecasts of the spot prices than the VAR, ARIMA and random-walk models, over several steps ahead