The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements

We investigate the behaviour of gold futures around the release of macroeconomic announcements. Market activity, in terms of traded volume, returns, and volatility, responds to new information quickly, with the majority of the reaction complete within 90-s. Surprises on the announcement of unemploym...

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Main Authors: Smales, Lee, Yang, Y.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Elsevier BV 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/40677
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author Smales, Lee
Yang, Y.
author_facet Smales, Lee
Yang, Y.
author_sort Smales, Lee
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description We investigate the behaviour of gold futures around the release of macroeconomic announcements. Market activity, in terms of traded volume, returns, and volatility, responds to new information quickly, with the majority of the reaction complete within 90-s. Surprises on the announcement of unemployment rate and GDP have the largest impact. Contrary to prior results for the equity market, gold futures exhibit greater reactions to ‘good’ economic news (which is negative for gold prices) and the magnitude of the response does not appear to increase during recession. Importantly, we employ a novel measure of belief dispersion, and we are able to demonstrate that the market response to macroeconomic news is significantly larger when belief dispersion is wider.
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institution Curtin University Malaysia
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publishDate 2015
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-406772018-02-12T23:56:20Z The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements Smales, Lee Yang, Y. Belief dispersion Gold futures COMEX Macroeconomic announcements High-frequency We investigate the behaviour of gold futures around the release of macroeconomic announcements. Market activity, in terms of traded volume, returns, and volatility, responds to new information quickly, with the majority of the reaction complete within 90-s. Surprises on the announcement of unemployment rate and GDP have the largest impact. Contrary to prior results for the equity market, gold futures exhibit greater reactions to ‘good’ economic news (which is negative for gold prices) and the magnitude of the response does not appear to increase during recession. Importantly, we employ a novel measure of belief dispersion, and we are able to demonstrate that the market response to macroeconomic news is significantly larger when belief dispersion is wider. 2015 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/40677 10.1016/j.irfa.2015.01.017 Elsevier BV fulltext
spellingShingle Belief dispersion
Gold futures
COMEX
Macroeconomic announcements
High-frequency
Smales, Lee
Yang, Y.
The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements
title The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements
title_full The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements
title_fullStr The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements
title_full_unstemmed The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements
title_short The importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements
title_sort importance of belief dispersion in the response of gold futures to macroeconomic announcements
topic Belief dispersion
Gold futures
COMEX
Macroeconomic announcements
High-frequency
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/40677