Modeling nonlinear dynamics of daily futures price changes

The purpose of this article is to characterize linear and nonlinear serial dependence in daily futures price changes. The daily prices of four futures are included in this study: (i) S&P 500; (ii) Japanese yen; (iii) Deutsche mark; and (iv) Eurodollar. Our major empirical findings are: (i) Based on the results of nonlinearity tests (that is, the BDS, the Q2, and the TAR‐F tests), we found all futures price changes contain nonlinearity in the series; (ii) a GARCH model can explain the source of nonlinearity for three out of four series; (iii) a threshold autoregressive model and autoregressive volatility model can adequately represent nonlinear dynamics of S&P 500 series; and (iv) deterministic chaos is not evident in the scaled residuals from the nonlinear time series models. Hence we favor a statistical time series approach to represent the data‐generating mechanism of futures price changes. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 325–351, 1999