Efficiency in Dirty Tanker Market

The maritime industry is highly capital intensive. From this point of view, it is very important that the return of the investments made is healthy. This can be achieved by efficiency of the freight market. The aim of this study is to contribute to the literature by testing the efficiency of the dirty tanker freight market used for the transportation of crude oil, which still has a great demand in the world economy, using an alternative test. In this direction, the daily values of the 1-year times charter rates of Aframax, Suezmax and VLCC ship types were used and the efficiencies of these three sub markets were tested using the Brock, Dechert and Scheinkman (BDS) independence test. The data set covering the years 2005 and 2017 and consisting of 663 observations per ship type on a weekly basis was used. As a result of the study, it is determined that the dirty tanker market does not exhibit random walk, in other words, does not have the characteristics of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), and that the time charter rates are related to their past values. This situation makes it possible to obtain excess profits using past data and some trading strategies.