Unveiling trading patterns: iTraxx Europe financials from the great financial crisis to ECB monetary easing

Abstract

Financial stability is a statutory concern of the European Central Bank. Spreads of bank credit default swaps (CDS) indices are a reference for financial stability, but the literature is scarce in this respect. This paper poses the novel research question of which characteristics of investors in these derivatives are implied by the volatility behavior of the returns of financial CDS indices. Daily spread returns for the 5-year maturity iTraxx Europe Financials (subordinated and senior), for the period between June 2004 and March 2015, are used to estimate a GJR-M model with Student t innovations, and two MGARCH models (one with constant and the other with dynamic conditional correlations). The results show that investors in the index referring to subordinated debt are risk averse (risk premium estimate of 0.688) and liable to leverage effects, while investors in the index for senior debt do not have such characteristics. The degrees of freedom of the Student t innovations are estimated to be 4 for both indices, implying that returns have distributions with very fat tails. Population excess kurtosis diverges to infinity. The results show that the conditional correlation between the indices is dynamic. Although correlations vary widely, most of that variation occurs before the Euro Area crisis. It is concluded that the inclusion of both indices in a portfolio would be misadvised for bear markets with distressed financial entities: the correlations are always positive, above 0.75 since 2010. Moreover, both indices prove to be sensitive to the varying surrounding conditions as investors share market sentiments.