Agency mortgage-backed securities trade simultaneously in a market for specified pools (SPs) and in the to-be-announced (TBA) forward market. TBA trading creates liquidity by allowing thousands of different MBS to be traded in a handful of TBA contracts. SPs that are eligible to be traded as...

Investors can trade individual agency mortgage-backed securities as specified pools (SPs), or trade them through TBA forward contracts. Sellers in the TBA market deliver the cheapest possible pool that fulfills the contracts, so they are traded on a cheapest to deliver basis. More valuable...

This paper reviews the more recent literature addressing different facets of speculation in commodity markets, including the role of speculators and the impact that financialization in recent years. While speculation and financialization can theoretically destabilize commodity markets, the...

Margins are the major safeguards against default risk on a derivatives exchange. When the clearing house sets margin requirements, it does so by only focusing on individual clearing firm positions (e.g., the SPAN system). We depart from this traditional approach and present an alternative method...

We present CoMargin, a new methodology to estimate collateral requirements for central counterparties (CCPs) in derivatives markets. CoMargin depends on both the tail risk of a given market participant and its interdependence with other participants. Our approach internalizes market...