India occupies the fifth position in the vegetable oil economy of the world. The demand for oilseeds and vegetable oil has far exceeded the domestic output necessitating huge imports. Futures market helps to bring price stability for the development of the underlying physical market. The present study investigates the volatility dynamics in spot and futures markets of select oil and oilseeds commodities.

The objectives of this article are to study (a) the information transmission process between spot and futures markets, also called volatility spillover and (b) the impact of futures trading activity on the volatility of physical market prices.

The commodities selected from oil and oilseeds segment are refined soya oil, mustard seed, crude palm oil, and mentha oil. The study uses basic Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model to capture volatility in prices of the selected commodities. Bivariate GARCH model makes use of information in the history of two different markets for testing volatility spillover between two markets of the same underlying commodity.

The relationship between futures trading activity and spot price volatility is investigated for examining the impact of futures trading activity on the volatility of underlying spot market. Two variables, viz., futures trading volume and open interest are decomposed into expected and unexpected components and are taken as a proxy for the level of trading activity. The contemporaneous and dynamic relationships are studied with the help of augmented GARCH model and Granger causality, respectively.

It is observed that there is an efficient transmission of information between spot and futures markets but it is the spot market which leads to the flow of information to futures and hence causes greater spillover of volatility. The spot market has a greater impact on the volatility of futures market, indicating that informational efficiency of oilseeds spot market is stronger than that of the futures market.

The contemporaneous and dynamic relationship between spot price volatility and futures trading activity tested with econometric models provide evidence of the destabilizing impact of an unexpected increase in futures trading activity (volume or open interest) on the spot price volatility in three out of four commodities studied. This indicates that badly informed traders present in futures market are destabilizing the underlying spot market by inducing noise and lowering the information content of prices.