Hedging Price Risk When Payment Dates are Uncertain

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of hedging price risk when payment dates are uncertain. It derives the variance minimizing dynamic hedging strategy, using forward contracts with different times to maturity. The resulting strategy fully hedges the expected price exposure for each possible payment date and is therefore easy to implement. An empirical study compares the performance of the variance minimizing strategy with heuristic alternatives, based on data from the crude oil market and the foreign exchange market. The variance minimizing strategy clearly outperforms the alternatives for the crude oil market. For the foreign exchange market, a simple static hedging strategy is sufficient.