Liquidity of China’s agricultural futures market: measurement and cross-market dependence

PurposeThis paper aims to present the first empirical liquidity measurement of China’s agricultural futures markets and study time-varying liquidity dependence across markets.Design/methodology/approachBased on both high- and low-frequency trading data of soybean and corn, this paper evaluates short-term liquidity adjustment in Chinese agricultural futures market measured by liquidity benchmark and long-term liquidity development measured by liquidity proxies.FindingsBy constructing comparisons, the authors identify the seminal paper of Fong, Holden and Trzcinka (2017) as the best low-frequency liquidity proxy in China’s agricultural futures market and capture similar historical patterns of the liquidity in soybean and corn markets. The authors further employ Copula-generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models to investigate liquidity dependence between soybean and corn futures markets. Results show that cross-market liquidity dependence tends to be dynamic and asymmetric (in upper versus lower tails). The liquidity dependence becomes stronger when these markets experience negative shocks than positive shocks, indicating a concern on the contagion effect of liquidity risk under negative financial situations.Originality/valueThe findings of this study provide useful information on the dynamic evolution of liquidity pattern and cross-market dependence of fastest-growing agricultural futures in the largest emerging economy.

Stablecoins and Central Bank Digital Currencies: Policy and Regulatory Challenges

Stablecoins and central bank digital currencies are on the horizon in Asia, and in some cases have already arrived. This paper provides new analysis and a critique of the use case for both forms of digital currency. It provides time-varying estimates of devaluation risk for the leading stablecoin, Tether, using data from the futures market. It describes the formidable obstacles to widespread use of central bank digital currencies in cross-border transactions, the context in which their utility is arguably greatest. The bottom line is that significant uncertainties continue to dog the region's digital currency initiatives.

Autofiction and Film: Archival Practices in Post-millennial Documentary Cinema in Argentina and Spain

This chapter examines three recent autofictional documentaries produced in Argentina and Spain—Albertina Carri’s Cuatreros (Rustlers), Mercedes Álvarez’s Mercado de futuros (Futures Market), and Víctor Erice’s Vidros partidos (Broken Windows)—which share a distinctive “archival impulse.” These films propose a meaning in a specific political sense which we read in relation to the contexts of the Iberian financial crisis and the memories of political violence during the last dictatorship in Argentina. We address the autofictional strategies through which the filmmakers “re-stage” the archive by adopting an aesthetics of ambiguity that unsettles the modern paradigm of the archive as static evidence of a given reality, revolving instead around a conception of the archive as a self-reflective process that becomes the subject matter in its own right.

Price Risk Measurement of China’s Soybean Futures Market Based on the VAR-GJR-GARCH Model

As one of the main forces in the futures market, agricultural product futures occupy an important position in China’s market. As China’s futures market started late and its maturity was low, there are many risks. This study focuses on the Dalian soybean futures market. Dynamic risk measurement models were established to empirically analyze risk measurement problems under different confidence levels. Then, the conditional variance calculated by the volatility model was introduced into the value-at-risk model, and the accuracy of the risk measurement was tested using the failure rate test model. The empirical results show that the risk values calculated by the established models at the 99% and 95% confidence levels are more valuable through the failure rate test, and the risk of China’s soybean futures market can be measured more accurately. The characteristics of “peak thick tail” and “leverage effect” are added to the combination model to calculate the conditional variance more accurately. The failure rate test method is used to test the model, which enriches the research problem of risk measurement.

Reinforcement-learning-based optimal trading in a simulated futures market with heterogeneous agents

This paper simulates a futures market with multiple agents and sequential auctions, where agents receive long-lived heterogeneous signals on the true value of an asset and with a known deadline. The evolution of the amount of differential information and its impact on the distribution of overall gains and the pace of truth discovery is examined for various depth levels of the limit order book (LOB). The paper also formulates a dynamic programming model for the problem and presents an associated reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for finding optimal strategy in exploiting informational disparity. This is done from the perspective of an agent whose information is superior to the collective information of the rest of the market. Finally, a numerical analysis is presented based on a futures market example to validate the proposed methodology for finding the optimal strategy. We find evidence in favor of a waiting strategy where agent does not reveal her signal until the last auction before the deadline. This result may help bring more insight into the micro-structural dynamics that work against market efficiency.

URGENSI PENGATURAN UNDANG-UNDANG PASAR FISIK ASET KRIPTO (CRYPTO ASSET)

Crypto Assets is a new alternative investment concept in Indonesia. The legal basis for regulating crypto assets currently in force in Indonesia cannot accommodate the development of the Crypto assets concept which continues to undergo significant changes. The physical market for crypto assets is incompatible when regulated by the provisions of Law Number 32 of 1997 on commodity futures trading and its amendments, namely Law Number 10 of 2011 because the physical market has conceptual differences with the provisions of the futures market in general. The object traded in the physical market is the commodity, while in the commodity futures market the object is futures contracts (and their derivatives) for commodities traded in the physical market. The scope of the commodity futures market as regulated in Article 1 of the Commodity Futures Trading Law does not accommodate commodity trading in the physical market. The urgency of regulating the physical market for crypto assets with a separate law is the implementation of the principle of legal certainty and protection of crypto asset investors. The method used in writing this journal is normative research using books, journal references, and laws and regulations that are relevant to the legal issues in this study. The results of this study indicate that the regulation of the physical law on crypto assets is needed because crypto assets should be regulated into two separate arrangements so that it is not appropriate if the regulation regarding crypto assets is only accommodated by the Commodity Futures Trading Law.