8006 Exam Dumps : Exam I: Finance Theory Financial Instruments Financial Markets - 2015 Edition

Backwardation is said to occur when futures prices are lower than the current spot prices. This would happen only when carrying costs are negative. Carrying costs are equal to interest, plus storage costs and less any 'convenience yield'. The existence of large convenience yields may explain backwardation in commodity futures prices. Therefore Choice 'd' is the correct answer.

Contango is the 'normal' market situation where forward prices are higher than spot prices. Storage costs explain contango, not backwardation. Risk free rates, or the cost of funding for the futures position, are always positive and do not explain backwardation.

The effectiveness of the hedge is solely determined by the correlation between the position being hedged, and the position being used as the hedge. A hedge can be perfect when correlation is 1, and will be less than perfect when it is anything other than 1.The effectiveness of the optimal hedge is given by the formula √(1-ρ2), where ρ is the correlation between the two. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer. Standard deviations affect the hedge ratio, not the effectiveness of the hedge.

Consider a long vanilla call at a strike of K1, and a short call with a strike price of K2 so that K2>K1. If you construct the payoff diagrams for these option positions, you will see that the combined payoff resembles very closely the payoff of a digital cash-or-nothing option. By bringing K2 and K1 closer together, we can make it very close to a digital cash-or-nothing option. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.