The hedging pressure hypothesis and the risk premium in the soybean reverse crush spread

Abstract

This article formalizes Keynes’s hypothesis that the need to attract speculative capital to match hedgers’ trades will create a difference between the futures and expected maturity price. We expand this analysis to the soybean complex where we have speculator and hedgers in soybeans, soybean meal and soybean oil. We focus on the crush spread because it is unlikely that hedgers will want to make simultaneous trades on the opposite side of soybean crushers in all three markets. We find strong evidence of a positive return to speculators who provide this liquidity.