Modelling Crude Oil Returns Using the NRIG Distribution

Abstract

Over the past decade, crude oil prices have risen dramatically, making the oil market very volatile and risky; hence, implementing an efficient risk management tool against market risk is crucial. Value-at-risk (VaR) has become the most common tool in this context to quantify market risk. Financial data typically have certain features such as volatility clustering, asymmetry, and heavy and semi-heavy tails, making it hard, if not impossible, to model them by using a normal distribution. In this paper, we propose the subclasses of the generalised hyperbolic distributions (GHDs), as appropriate models for capturing these characteristics for the crude oil and gasoline returns. We also introduce the new subclass of GHDs, namely normal reciprocal inverse Gaussian distribution (NRIG), in evaluating the VaR for the crude oil and gasoline market. Furthermore, VaR estimation and backtesting procedures using the Kupiec likelihood ratio test are conducted to test the extreme tails of these models. The main findings from the Kupiec likelihood test statistics suggest that the best GHD model should be chosen at various VaR levels. Thus, the final results of this research allow risk managers, financial analysts, and energy market academics to be flexible in choosing a robust risk quantification model for crude oil and gasoline returns at their specific VaR levels of interest. Particularly for NRIG, the results suggest that a better VaR estimation is provided at the long positions.