Alternative Models for Hedging Yield Curve Risk: An Empirical Comparison

Abstract

We develop alternative models for hedging yield curve risk and test them by hedging US Treasury bond portfolios through note/bond futures. We show that traditional implementations of models based on principal component analysis, duration vectors and key rate duration lead to high exposure to model errors and to sizable transaction costs, thus lowering the hedging quality. Also, this quality varies from one test case to the other, so that a clear ranking of the models is not possible. We show that accounting for the variance of modeling errors substantially reduces both hedging errors and transaction costs for all considered models. Also, this allows to clearly rank these models: error-adjusted principal component analysis systematically and significantly outperforms alternative models