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Investor Preferences for Futures Straddles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

Extract

This paper analyzed the issue of why large commodity futures traders hold a large percentage of their portfolios in straddle positions where, for the most part, such behavior implies that they are holding assets with negative expected returns. It showed that an earlier paper by Schrock [2], which suggested that such behavior provided a means by which investors could enhance their risk-return tradeoffs, provided only a partial explanation for this behavior which, in a world of positive interest rates, held only under fairly restrictive conditions. Thus, it went on to develop a more general result which strongly suggests that differentially low margin requirements on straddle positions provide a strong incentive in a world of positive interest rates for investors to hold commodity straddle positions. With some modification the model developed in this paper can be used to derive similar conclusions for certain classes of transactions in the stock options market.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © School of Business Administration, University of Washington 1977

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References

REFERENCES

[1]Briloff, Abraham J. “Income Tax Aspects of Commodity Futures Transactions.” In Guide to Commodity Price Forecasting, edited by Jiler, H.. New York: Commodity Research Bureau, Inc., 1975, pp. 8898.Google Scholar
[2]Schrock, Nicholas W.The Theory of Asset Choice: Simultaneous Holding of Short and Long Positions in the Futures Market.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 79, No. 2 (March/April 1971), pp. 270293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar