Currency Hedging for International Stock Portfolios

This paper tests whether hedging currency risk improves the performance of international stock portfolios. We use a generalized performance measure which allows for investor-dependencies such as different utility functions and the presence of nontraded risks. In addition we show that an auxiliary regression, similar to the Jensen regression, provides a wealth of information about the optimal portfolio holdings for investors for the non mean-variance case. This is analogous to the information provided by the Jensen regression about optimal portfolio holdings for the mean-variance case. Our empirical results show that static hedging with currency forwards does not lead to improvements in portfolio performance for a US investor that holds a stock portfolio from the G5 countries. On the other hand, hedges that are conditional on the current interest rate spread do lead to significant performance improvements. Also, when an investor has a substantial exogenous exposure to one of the currencies, currency hedging clearly improves his portfolio performance. While these results hold for investors with power utility as well as with mean-variance utility functions, the optimal hedge ratios for these investors are different.currency risk;forwards;hedging;international asset pricing;portfolio choice

Option Formulas for Mean-Reverting Power Prices with Spikes

Electricity prices are known to be very volatile and subject to frequent jumps due to system breakdown, demand shocks, and inelastic supply. Appropriate pricing, portfolio, and risk management models should incorporate these spikes. We develop a framework to price European-style options that are consistent with the possibility of market spikes. The pricing framework is based on a regime jump model that disentangles mean-reversion from the spikes. In the model the spikes are truly time-specific events and therefore independent from the mean-reverting price process. This closely resembles the characteristics of electricity prices, as we show with Dutch APX spot price data in the period January 2001 till June 2002. Thanks to the independence of the two price processes in the model, we break derivative prices down in a mean-reverting value and a spike value. We use this result to show how the model can be made consistent with forward prices in the market and present closed-form formulas for European-style options

Central bank policy in a more perfect financial system

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