Foreign Exchange Futures Trading and Spot Market Volatility in Thailand

Abstract

This paper investigates how the introduction of foreign exchange futures has an impact on spot volatility and considers the contemporaneous and dynamic relationship between spot volatility and foreign exchange futures trading activity, including trading volume and open interest in the Thailand Futures Exchange context, with the examples of the EUR/USD futures and USD/JPY futures. The results of the EGARCH (1,1) model show that the introduction of foreign exchange futures decreases spot volatility. It also increases the rate at which new information is impounded into spot prices but decreases the persistency of volatility shocks. A positive effect of unexpected trading volume and a negative effect of unexpected open interest on contemporaneous spot volatility are in line with the VAR(1) model results of the dynamic relationship between spot volatility and foreign exchange futures trading activity. With the impact on spot volatility caused by unexpected open interest rate being stronger than by unexpected trading volume, foreign exchange futures trading stabilizes spot volatility.

Keywords

• foreign exchange futures
• spot volatility
• GARCH family models
• VAR