Currency value

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. We assess the properties of currency value strategies based on real exchange rates. We find that real exchange rates have predictive power for the cross-section of currency excess returns. However, adjusting real exchange rates for key country-specific fundamentals (productivity, the quality of export goods, net foreign assets, and output gaps) better isolates information related to the currency risk premium. In turn, the resultant measure of currency value displays considerably stronger predictive power for currency excess returns. Finally, the predictive information content in our currency value measure is distinct from that embedded in popular currency strategies, such as carry and momentum

Eine „dienende Rolle“ für den Finanzsektor? Nicht dienen, sondern funktionieren!

The image is undisputed in the political debate that the function of the financial sector is to "play servant" to the real economy, but the consequences derived from this debate are controversial. Clearer is the academic concept to restrict the functions of the financial sector deliberately. But such restriction is hardly convincing from the different persepectives of functionality. Because of this indetermination and, respectively, restriction, a "servant role" is apparently inappropriate as a useful yardstick for reorienting the financial sector. In line with this image, it would certainly be possible to improve crisis prevention, but at the price of cuts in important functions so that a "sevant role" as a concept of crisis prevention would not be desirable either

When is Foreign Exchange Intervention Effective? Evidence from 33 Countries

This paper examines foreign exchange intervention based on novel daily data covering 33 countries from 1995 to 2011. We find that intervention is widely used and an effective policy tool, with a success rate in excess of 80 percent under some criteria. The policy works well in terms of smoothing the path of exchange rates, and in stabilizing the exchange rate in countries with narrow band regimes. Moving the level of the exchange rate in flexible regimes requires that some conditions are met, including the use of large volumes and that intervention is made public and supported via communication

The signalling channel of Central Bank interventions:modelling the Yen/US dollar exchange rate

This paper presents a theoretical framework analysing the signalling channel of exchange rate interventions as an informational trigger. We develop an implicit target zone framework with learning in order to model the signalling channel. The theoretical premise of the model is that interventions convey signals that communicate information about the exchange rate objectives of the central bank. The model is used to analyse the impact of Japanese FX interventions during the period 1999--2011 on the yen/US dollar dynamics

Information flows in foreign exchange markets: dissecting customer currency trades

© 2016 the American Finance Association. We study the information in order flows in the world's largest over-the-counter market, the foreign exchange (FX) market. The analysis draws on a data set covering a broad cross-section of currencies and different customer segments of FX end-users. The results suggest that order flows are highly informative about future exchange rates and provide significant economic value. We also find that different customer groups can share risk with each other effectively through the intermediation of a large dealer, and differ markedly in their predictive ability, trading styles, and risk exposure

A simple scheme for allocating capital in a foreign exchange proprietary trading firm

We present a model of capital allocation in a foreign exchange proprietary trading firm. The owner allocates capital to individual traders, who operate within strict risk limits. Traders specialize in individual currencies, but are given discretion over their choice of trading rule. The owner provides the simple formula that determines position sizes – a formula that does not require estimation of the firm-level covariance matrix. We provide supporting empirical evidence of excess risk-adjusted returns to the firm-level portfolio, and we discuss a modification of the model in which the owner dictates the choice of trading rule

Fractal Profit Landscape of the Stock Market

We investigate the structure of the profit landscape obtained from the most basic, fluctuation based, trading strategy applied for the daily stock price data. The strategy is parameterized by only two variables, p and q. Stocks are sold and bought if the log return is bigger than p and less than -q, respectively. Repetition of this simple strategy for a long time gives the profit defined in the underlying two-dimensional parameter space of p and q. It is revealed that the local maxima in the profit landscape are spread in the form of a fractal structure. The fractal structure implies that successful strategies are not localized to any region of the profit landscape and are neither spaced evenly throughout the profit landscape, which makes the optimization notoriously hard and hypersensitive for partial or limited information. The concrete implication of this property is demonstrated by showing that optimization of one stock for future values or other stocks renders worse profit than a strategy that ignores fluctuations, i.e., a long-term buy-and-hold strategy.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure