This paper introduces a new test of the predictive performance and market timing for categorical forecasts based on contingency tables when the user has non-categorical loss functions. For example, a user might be interested in the return of an underlying variable instead of just the direction....

A well-documented empirical result is that market expectations extracted from futures contracts on the federal funds rate are among the best predictors for the future course of monetary policy. We show how this information can be exploited to produce accurate forecasts of bond excess returns and...