The Impact of Stock Index Futures Trading on Daily Returns Seasonality: A Multicountry Study

In this article, we investigate the impact of the introduction of stock index futures trading on the daily returns seasonality of the underlying index for seven national markets. It has been previously argued that the introduction of futures trading should lead to reduced seasonality of mean returns, and generally our results support this conclusion. The impact of index futures introduction on return autocorrelations and volatility is also tested, and the evidence presented suggests that futures trading has no impact on the former, although a change in the seasonal for the latter was detected.