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We analyze the impact of macroeconomic news surprises for Canada, the Euro area, Japan, the UK, and the US relating to returns and volatility for West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude oil futures. We look at futures markets, since they are widely believed to predict spot market movements. We also investigate the possibility of an asymmetric impact of good and bad macroeconomic news surprises, as well as the role of economic uncertainty for these economies in affecting oil futures market movements. Two major conclusions can de drawn from our study: (a) macroeconomic surprises, as well as uncertainties for other economies (over and above that of the US) were found to be important in driving oil futures, with the effect of these other economies being relatively stronger than the US in some instances; and (b) there is strong evidence of asymmetric effects, especially for volatility.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the interaction between sentiments and past prices can lead to higher abnormal profit in futures markets. Such examinations allow the authors to relate the paper to the debate that focuses on examining the behavior of different types of traders in futures market, and who among these traders destabilize the markets. Design/methodology/approach First, the authors develop new dynamic strategies in US futures market that combine sentiment by type of traders based on trader position provided by the Disaggregated Commitments of Traders with short-term contrarian signals. Next, the authors adjust the abnormal profits to the CAPM model and Miffre and Rallis’s (2007) model. Finally, the authors use the Du (2012) decomposition methodology. Findings The main findings are that the abnormal profit is more pronounced when the authors combine past returns with lagged high producer/merchant/processor/user or low managed money sentiment. The results from swap dealer or other reportable groups show that there is no pervasive directional relation between their sentiment and contrarian profit. A further investigation of the sources of abnormal profits demonstrates that these profits survive even after the adjustment of obtained return to risk. Instead, these profits are mainly due to the overreaction to the news by irrational traders. Originality/value Based on behavioral finance theories, the authors conclude that producer, merchant, processor and user behave like irrational traders, while managed money traders behave like rational ones. Given that current regulatory proposes the limitation of speculation, the policy implications of these results are important. Therefore, these findings suggest that policy distinctions on trading motives may be more challenging to construct than ever.

Juncal Cunado gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad (ECO2017-83183-R).

In this paper, we use data from the DCOT report to test the usefulness of trader-position-based sentiment in explaining returns and volatility in 13 major futures markets. Our main findings are that shifts in Producer/Merchant/Processor/User sentiment are positively related to price volatility in the majority of the tested markets and tend to destabilize these markets, while shifts in Money Manager sentiment tend to stabilize futures markets by reducing market volatility. we further investigate the relevance of behavioral finance and noise trader theory in futures markets by allowing for asymmetry in the variance equation of the used EGARCH model. We find that Producer/Merchant/Processor/User entities may behave like irrational investors and thus destabilize markets as they become bullish, while Money Managers may behave like rational traders and then tend to counterbalance price deviations from fundamental values caused by irrational trades.

Our study adds to the literature by providing initial evidence on the interaction between short-horizon return predictability and investors’ sentiment by traders’ types on US commodity futures market. We find that the short-term contrarian profit is more associated with an increase rather than a decrease in hedgers’ sentiment. However, the interaction between lagged return and past change in speculators’ sentiment illustrates that the short-term contrarian profit is more associated with a decrease rather than an increase in sentiment. Based on behavioral finance theories, we conclude that hedgers behave like irrational traders while speculators behave like rational ones. Using Chou et al. (2007) decomposition, our results confirm the obtained relations between change in trader's sentiment and the overreaction. By expanding this decomposition, we find that the winners’ portfolio tends to more overreact with futures specific information. Also, the cross-autocorrelation between winners and losers and between losers and winners can represent another source of contrarian profits.

This paper analyses the connectedness network for commercial traders’ sentiment across agriculture, energy, metals and livestock futures markets. The findings find that: (a) producer/merchant/processor/user (PMPU) in agricultural and energy markets are mainly engaged in cross-hedging in the futures market, and most of them would avoid risks in these markets by operating in the metal markets, which can be considered safe for PMPU traders, and that the cross-hedging strategies may play the role of PMPU sentiment spillover across futures markets; (b) as index traders, the swap dealers operate more in two markets, namely between the agricultural and metal markets, or between the agricultural and energy markets; (c) the influence of geopolitical risks in some countries can affect the stability of energy markets, which in turn can cause PMPU system-wide connectedness.