Managing Price Risk in the Corn Market Using Option Strategies

Abstract

In today’s economy, the agricultural sector faces a high degree of risk due to increasing commodity price volatility. Therefore, it is important to know how to manage the price risk effectively. The main contribution of the paper is to introduce and analyse the ways of the managing price risk in the corn market using option strategies. The purpose of the paper is to analyse three hedging option strategies, i.e. Strap, Long Strangle and Short Put Ladder strategy with the aim to prove how it is possible to hedge against falling prices. There is examined analytical expressions of vanilla options for the creation of selected hedging strategies in the corn market with the presentation of their pros and cons. General expressions of the corn selling price intervals are derived from various hedged scenarios of all variants. Based on derived theoretical hedging variants, the contribution of the approach is considered for the application to the corn market, where the corn options on futures contracts are traded on the Chicago Board of Trade. Also, the evaluation of the sellers’ profitability is examined at the future trade date. Finally, a comparative analysis of the proposed hedging techniques with the various strike prices is displayed with the presentation of recommendations for potential corn sellers. The paper’s aim is to extend the previous research based on different hedging tools and it may be widened in the scientific and the commercial area.

Keywords

• risk management
• options
• option strategy
• agricultural market
• corn futures
• volatility