Some empirical studies have shown that asset prices respond to announcements of economic news, however, others also have found little evidence. This study assesses how market participants of the S&P 500 Index Futures reacted to the U.S. economic news announcements. For this purpose, using a GARCH (Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity) model, we use several U.S. news variables, its each surprise component and interest rates.

We find that some economic news variables affected significantly on the S&P 500 Index Futures. In other words, we find that weekend variable, lagged volatility, and surprise component of trade deficit increased level of volatility. However, interest rate, MI, unemployment announcements caused the variance of the S&P 500 Index Futures to reduce, and each of the surprise component of M1and trade deficit increased it. The result suggests that resolution of uncertainty, through economic news announcement, while, in some cases, causes market participants to reduce their forecast of volatility, a large difference between the market's forecast and the realization of the series causes the volatility to increase.