Overreaction of index futures in Hong Kong

In this paper we show that the pricing error of index futures relative to its fair value can be used to identify investors' overreaction in index futures market. Specifically, when investors are overly pessimistic (optimistic), the prices of index futures are well below (above) their fair values. When the excess pessimism (optimism) is gone, the prices of index futures revert to catch up with their fair values. After taking into consideration transaction cost, execution time lag, and risk adjustment, profitable strategies can be developed to exploit this overreaction. We find that overreaction exists during intraday trading and market closing.