Market Risk of Gold Futures and Gold Spot under Geopolitical Risk
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/fqw8mz14Keywords:
GARCH-X; Geopolitical Risk; Gold futures; Spot market; Volatility; Value-at-Risk; Conditional heteroskedasticity.Abstract
With the heightening financial globalization, the market risk has increased strongly especially at times of geopolitical uncertainty. Gold that has traditionally been considered a safe-haven asset is highly volatile when there is an escalation of geopolitical tensions. Nonetheless, the variability that occurs to the spot and futures markets has not been fully investigated. The paper determines the factor of Geopolitical Risk (GPR) on conditional volatility of gold futures and spot returns by the GARCH-X(1,1) model that incorporates the Student-t innovations. A standardized GPR index is introduced as an exogenous variable in the equation of variance using monthly data between the year 1980 and 2023. We find that, lagged GPR has a positive effect on futures volatility, but that effect is somewhat significant, indicating that futures markets that are more vulnerable to geopolitical shocks are speculative and leveraged derivatives markets. By comparison, the spot market volatility does not exhibit any important effect of GPR, meaning that it is self-enhanced by past shocks. Ljung-Box diagnostics indicate some residual autocorrelation in the futures model, indicating that there is some possibility to refine the model by using alternative GARCH specification, or adding more terms to the mean equation. GARKH-X(t) model is highly suitable in terms of volatility dynamics in the futures, whereas spot volatility is more stable. The study has significant implications on risk management, portfolio hedging policies, and regulatory controls on derivatives markets in times of geopolitical crises.
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