Spot contract

About: Spot contract is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3437 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91599 citations.

Rational Expectations and the Foreign Exchange Market

Abstract: Many models of exchange rate determination imply that movements in money supplies and demands should result in movements in exchange rates. Hence, if rational agents are attempting to forecast exchange rate movements, they should in the first instance forecast movements in the supplies of and demands for money balances. Furthermore, if these underlying variables follow some stable autoregressive processes agents should use those processes to make their forecasts. If we identify the forward rate with the market's expectation for the future spot rate, rationality of expectations will imply testable cross-equation restrictions in a joint model of the autoregressions and exchange rate forecasting equation. This strategy is implemented in the paper using data on the L UK/$US and DM/$US exchange rates from the recent floating rate period.

Market integration of Virtual Power Plants

Abstract: We consider a direct control Virtual Power Plant, which is given the task of maximizing the profit of a portfolio of flexible consumers by trading flexibility in Energy and Power Markets. Spot price optimization has been quite intensively researched in Smart Grid literature lately. In this work, however, we develop a three stage market model, which includes Day-Ahead (Spot), Intra-Day and Regulating Power Markets. This allows us to test the hypothesis that the Virtual Power Plant can generate additional profit by trading across several markets. We find that even though profits do increase as more markets are penetrated, the size of the profit is strongly dependent on the type of flexibility considered. We also find that penetrating several markets makes profits surprisingly robust to spot price prediction errors.

Forecasting Weekly Electricity Prices at Nord Pool

Abstract: This paper analyses the forecasting power of weekly futures prices at Nord Pool. The forecasting power of futures prices is compared to an ARIMAX model of the spot price. The time series model contains lagged external variables such as: temperature, precipitation, reservoir levels and the basis (futures price less the spot price); and generally reflects the typical seasonal patterns in weekly spot prices. Results show that the time series model forecasts significantly beat futures prices when using the Diebold and Mariano (1995) test. Furthermore, the average forecasting error of futures prices reveals that they are significantly above the settlement spot price at the 'delivery week' and their size increases as the time to maturity increases. Those agents taking positions in weekly futures contracts at Nord Pool might find the estimated ARIMAX model useful for improving their expectation formation process for the underlying spot price.

Inventory control in dual sourcing commodity procurement with price correlation

Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the role of inventory management as a means for operational hedging by dual sourcing of commodities using a multi-period option contract and spot market. We consider a manufacturing company in a make-to-stock environment with uncertain product demand. We replace the common i.i.d. price assumption that is typical in operations management studies by the mean reverting price model, a more realistic spot price model with inter-temporal price–price correlation. Additionally, we address the case where the spot price in one period is correlated with the demand in the previous period (demand–price correlation). The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, we reveal that price–price correlation has a considerable impact on the structural properties of optimal stock-keeping policies. Furthermore, we isolate two main effects of correlation in spot-price dynamics when selecting policy parameters: a variability effect, which increases the benefits from stock-keeping and lessens the usage of the option contract, and a counteracting correlation effect that exploits persistence of low/high spot price incidences. Finally, in a numerical study we show under which circumstances disregarding the correlation can result in large performance losses.