Empirical Study on Arbitrage Opportunities in China Copper Futures Market

Introduction Arbitrage opportunities attract considerable atten-tion of scholars in economics and finance. Modiglianiand Miller first performed no-arbitrage equilibriumanalysis in 19581]. Following their work, Black andScholes2]deduced the option pricing model. Ross3]and Cox4]put forward arbitrage theory and risk neu-tral pricing method. Harrison and Kreps5], and Har-rison and Pliska6]proved that the no-arbitrage equi-librium system can be constructed by equivalent mar-tingale measur…

Empirical Study on Arbitrage Opportunities in China Copper Futures Market

No-arbitrage bound is established with no-arbitrage theory considering all kinds of trade costs, different deposit and loan interest rate, margin and tax in futures markets. The empirical results find that there are many lower bound arbitrage opportunities in China copper futures market from August 8th, 2003 to August 16th, 2005. Concretely, no-arbitrage opportunity is dominant and lower bound arbitrage is narrow in normal market segment. Lower bound arbitrage almost always exists with huge magnitude in inverted market segment. There is basically no-arbitrage in normal market because spot volume is enough, so that upper or lower bound arbitrage can be realized. There is mostly lower bound arbitrage in inverted market because spot volume is lack.