Pascal Spreading of Short-Term Interest Rate Contracts

Abstract

This paper examines the spreading and pricing of short-term interest rate futures contracts and shows how traditional types of calendar spread positions can emerge as explicit arbitrage solutions. A specific set of intuitive spreading structures – “Pascal’s Spreading Triangle” – arises when the underlying daily risk factors are identified as the stochastic coefficients of a high-ordered polynomial approximation to the yield curve. No empirically estimated hedge ratios are required for these arbitrage strategies. Application of this Pascal Spreads framework to pricing and trading the LIFFE’s Short Sterling deposit futures market over the 1989 to 1998 sample period reveals that the LIFFE’s Short Sterling arbitrage sector’s efficiency has improved markedly over time. The improvement over the decade coincides with the dramatic declines in futures trading transactions costs. As a byproduct, the framework extracts and measures the quantitative impact of the Y2K millennium-turn pricing distortion on the December 1999 Short Sterling futures contract.