Does Trading Volume explain the Information Flow of Crude Palm Oil Futures Returns?

Abstract

This study examines the role of trading volume in the crude palm oil (CPO)futures market as a proxy for information áow from the perspective of the mixture-of-distributions hypothesis (MDH). Using the data from January 2000 to April 2017, a sym-metric GARCH model has been estimated, in which the residuals follow alternatively thenormal Student-t and generalised error distribution. An alternative augmented model thatconsists of trading volume as an exogenous variable is estimated with the same error dis-tributions. Our results suggest several conclusions: First, the trading volume could not actas a true proxy for information áow. This indicates that volume of futures trading containsrelatively less price-sensitive information. Secondly, the inclusion of trading volume into theconditional variance equation with Student-t distributed errors is important for modellingpurposes when the returns are leptokurtic and positively skewed. Hence, it can be concludedthat the use of return and trading volume will enhance the current information set usedby practitioners and analysts in pricing the CPO futures contract when there exists a highdegree of leptokurtosis in the returns. This is the Örst study that validates the MDH in thecontext of the CPO futures market