Real-time price discovery in global stock, bond and foreign exchange markets

Using a unique high-frequency futures dataset, we characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. We find that news produces conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency stock, bond and exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. Equity markets, moreover, react differently to news depending on the stage of the business cycle, which explains the low correlation between stock and bond returns when averaged over the cycle. Hence our results qualify earlier work suggesting that bond markets react most strongly to macroeconomic news; in particular, when conditioning on the state of the economy, the equity and foreign exchange markets appear equally responsive. Finally, we also document important contemporaneous links across all markets and countries, even after controlling for the effects of macroeconomic news.     

Market microstructure of FT-SE 100 index futures: An intraday empirical analysis

This article examines the market microstructure of the FT-SE Index futures market by analyzing the intraday patterns of bid-ask spreads and trading activity. The patterns are remarkably different from those of stock and options markets because of the futures market's open outcry system with frenzied scalpers/short-term marketmakers. Spreads are stable over the day, but decline sharply at the close and increase when U.S. macroeconomic news is distributed. Traders actively trade at the open with narrow spreads and large trade sizes. Volatility and volume have higher values at the open and close and when U.S. news is released. The overall results suggest that information asymmetry in the index futures market is insignificant, and traders find it easy to control inventory. The results are also broadly consistent with the Grossman and Miller (1988) model that describes liquidity as the price of transaction demand for immediacy. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 31–58, 1999     

Macroeconomic announcements,intraday covariance structure and asymmetry in the interest rate futures returns

The effects of scheduled macroeconomic announcements on the real-time intraday return volatilities, covariances, and correlations between the Eurodollar futures and the U.S. Treasury bond futures markets are studied. These announcements are responsible for most of the observed intraday jumps in volatilities, covariances, and correlations. The details of the linkage are intriguing and include announcements timing effect. Further study on intraday asymmetric volatility and correlation-in-volatility indicates that news announcements magnify asymmetric volatility and shed light on why correlations tend to be high when volatilities are high. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 28:815–844, 2008     

Modelling spillovers between stock market and FX market: evidence for Nigeria

Abstract

The need to capture the foreign exchange (FX) and stock markets nexus in Nigeria is underscored by the rapidly expanding financial markets integration due to trade and financial liberalization policies which seem to have enhanced the inflow of capital as well as accelerated investment/business interactions. Using variants of the VARMA-AMGARCH model of McAleer, Hoti, and Chan (2009), we find that volatility persistence in the stock market is accentuated by bad news in the market and moderated by good news in the FX market. Finally, we establish that ignoring the asymmetric effects may exaggerate the spillover results.     

BRIC and the U.S. financial crisis: An empirical investigation of stock and bond markets

We examine empirical evidence of the behavior of stocks and bonds from BRIC nations by using daily data from January 2003 to July 2010. We present unconditional and conditional empirical results depending upon a simple measure of U.S. financial stress. In the long term, BRIC bond markets deviate much more from the U.S. financial stress measure than the BRIC bonds and stocks that deviate among themselves. Stock and bond return correlations for Brazil and Russia are significantly large and negative. The own correlations are more important in determining the evolution of the conditional correlations relative to unexpected news. Dynamic conditional correlations between stock returns, bond returns and U.S. financial stress increase after the Lehman Brothers' event in September 2008, except for the bond returns in India.     

Intraday Volatility in Interest‐Rate and Foreign‐Exchange Markets: ARCH,Announcement, and Seasonality Effects

We explore the determinants of intraday volatility in interest‐rate and foreign‐exchange markets, focusing on the importance and interaction of three types of information in predicting intraday volatility: (a) knowledge of recent past volatilities (i.e., ARCH or Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity effects); (b) prior knowledge of when major scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report or Producer Price Index, will be released; and (c) knowledge of seasonality patterns. We find that all three information sets have significant incremental predictive power, but macroeconomic announcements are the most important determinants of periods of very high intraday volatility (particularly in the interest‐rate markets). We show that because the three information sets are not independent, it is necessary to simultaneously consider all three to accurately measure intraday volatility patterns. For instance, we find that most of the previously documented time‐of‐day and day‐of‐the‐week volatility patterns in these markets are due to the tendency for macroeconomic announcements to occur on particular days and at particular times. Indeed, the familiar U‐shape completely disappears in the foreign‐exchange market. We also find that estimates of ARCH effects are considerably altered when we account for announcement effects and return periodicity; specifically, estimates of volatility persistence are sharply reduced. Separately, our results show that high volatility persists longer after shocks due to unscheduled announcements than after equivalent shocks due to scheduled announcements, indicating that market participants digest information much more quickly if they are prepared to receive it. However, contrary to results from equity markets, we find no evidence of a meaningful difference in volatility persistence after positive or negative price shocks. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21: 517–552, 2001     

Liquidity and macroeconomic management in emerging markets

Emerging markets have received considerable attention for foreign investment and international diversification due to the possibility of higher earnings and a low level of integration with global equity markets. These high returns often need to be balanced by the high liquidity costs of trading in illiquid emerging markets. Several studies have shown that central bank and government policies are significant determinants of market liquidity. We investigate the influence of monetary and fiscal policy variables on the market and firm level liquidity of eight emerging stock markets of Asia. Using four different (il)liquidity measures and nine macroeconomic variables, we find that changes in the money supply, government expenditure and private borrowing significantly affect stock market liquidity. Illiquidity is also strongly affected by the bank rate, short-term interest rate and government borrowing. We demonstrate that ‘crowding out’ and ‘cost of funds’ effects exist in these markets. Other major findings are that some markets are more sensitive to local macroeconomic news than world factors, the impact on size based portfolios largely depends on the instruments used by the central banks and government, the liquidity of the manufacturing sector is affected by changes in any policy variables, financial institutions are only influenced by monetary policy variables, and the service sector is least affected.     

中国货币政策不确定性和宏观经济新闻的人民币汇率效应

基于2012年4月30日至2018年12月17日的银行间7天逆回购操作利率,本文首次使用波动率回归拟合的方法,从政策利率的角度改进中国货币政策不确定性指数,并进一步研究了在不同程度货币政策不确定性的情况下,人民币兑美元汇率对宏观经济新闻的反应。收集和构建10项宏观经济新闻后,本文发现当市场参与者普遍不能较为准确地预测未来政策变化的情形时,货币政策不确定性上升,在岸、离岸人民币兑美元汇率对宏观经济新闻的反应显著减弱。当货币政策存在较高不确定性时,市场对未来政策判断的分歧加剧,进而人民币汇率对宏观经济新闻的反应不足。在货币政策不确定性较高时,增加央行的汇率沟通,可以发挥其对宏观经济新闻的补充作用,同时增强市场对宏观经济基本面信息的反应。本文不仅丰富了货币政策不确定性的负面影响、经济后果以及宏观经济新闻的人民币汇率效应相关理论研究,而且为未来货币政策制定、调整和实施提供了有价值的依据,为货币当局进行有效外汇市场干预提供了经验参考。     

The speed of stock price adjustment to corporate announcements: Insights from Turkey

The market reaction speeds to the news flow are currently measured at the millisecond level in developed markets. We investigate, using a unique setting from Turkey, whether the market reaction speeds in less sophisticated markets are on par with those of developed markets. We find that market reaction times to corporate announcements are slower than documented in recent studies, although markets react to positive news more quickly than negative news. When high-frequency traders are more active in the market prior to announcements, the speed of price adjustment is slower. Finally, we find sizable profit opportunities for investors following event-driven strategies.     

Credit cycle dependent spread determinants in emerging sovereign debt markets

We address credit cycle dependent sovereign credit risk determinants. In our model, the spread determinants' magnitude is conditional on an unobservable endogenous sovereign credit cycle as represented by the underlying state of a Markov regime switching process. Our explanatory variables are motivated in the tradition of structural credit risk models and include changes in asset prices, interest rates, implied market volatility, gold price changes and foreign exchange rates. We examine daily frequency variations of U.S. dollar denominated Eurobond credit spreads of four major Latin American sovereign bond issuers (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela) with liquid bond markets during March 2000 to June 2011. We find that spread determinants are statistically significant and consistent with theory, while their magnitude remarkably varies with the state of the credit cycle. Crisis states are characterized by high spread change uncertainty and high sensitivities with respect to the spread change determinants. We further document that not only changes of local currencies, but also changes of the Euro with respect to the U.S. dollar are significant spread drivers and argue that this is consistent with the sovereigns' ability to pay.     

Exchange rate regimes, globalisation, and the cost of capital in emerging markets

This paper presents a multifactor asset pricing model for currency, bond, and stock returns for ten emerging markets to investigate the effect of the exchange rate regime on the cost of capital and the integration of emerging financial markets. Our results suggest that a fixed exchange rate regime system can help reduce the cost of capital in emerging markets by reducing the currency risk premia demanded by foreign investors.     

The impact of macroeconomic announcements on emerging market bonds

This paper examines how emerging market bonds react to macroeconomic announcements. Global bond spreads respond to rating actions and changes in U.S. interest rates rather than domestic data and policy announcements. All announcements affect market volatility. Macroeconomic data and policy announcements reduce uncertainty and stabilize spreads, while rating actions cause greater volatility. Results are robust to country-specific and panel analyses, assuming conditional variance and controlling for the surprise content of news. In subsamples, announcements matter less for countries with more transparent policies and higher credit ratings. In a crisis, rating actions become less important, and investors focus on simple and timely indicators.     

The COVID-19 pandemic and financial markets in Central Europe: Macroeconomic measures and international policy spillovers

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic policy announcements on financial markets in three Central European economies: Czechia, Hungary, and Poland (CE–3). We focus on the unprecedented stabilisation policies implemented from March to December 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, including unconventional monetary measures and large stimulus programs. Detailed categories of monetary and fiscal measures are introduced into vector autoregressions with exogenous regressors and dynamic conditional correlations, which we estimate using daily data. This allows us to control for policy spillovers from abroad, as well as global risk factors and pandemic-related variables. We find that, in general, macroeconomic policy measures implemented in the CE–3 countries played an important role in stabilising financial markets during the pandemic. We uncover several notable patterns in the reaction of markets to anti-crisis measures across the region. The impact of the monetary policy announcements on 10-year sovereign bond yields was more substantial than on stock market returns and exchange rate returns. The communication of the unconventional tools proved effective in lowering the bond yields. Interestingly, we document that the effects of non-standard measures for some variables, such as the exchange rate, can be qualitatively different from those resulting from a conventional monetary expansion. Even though the domestic monetary events became more important than the fiscal ones, the latter proved relevant for financial market returns, especially when large-scale immediate fiscal measures and tax deferrals were introduced. We also show that the CE–3 economies were subject to the cross-border transmission of policy announcement effects from the Euro Area and the US, although the magnitude of these effects was smaller than expected and varied across the CE–3 countries.     

Measuring the effect of the zero lower bound on yields and exchange rates in the U.K. and Germany

The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates began to constrain many central banks' setting of short-term interest rates in late 2008 or early 2009. According to standard macroeconomic models, this should have greatly reduced the effectiveness of monetary policy and increased the efficacy of fiscal policy. However, these models also imply that asset prices and private-sector decisions depend on the entire path of expected future short-term interest rates, not just the current level of the monetary policy rate. Thus, interest rates with a year or more to maturity are arguably more relevant for asset prices and the economy, and it is unclear to what extent those yields have been affected by the zero lower bound. In this paper, we apply the methods of Swanson and Williams (2013) to medium- and longer-term yields and exchange rates in the U.K. and Germany. In particular, we compare the sensitivity of these rates to macroeconomic news during periods when short-term interest rates were very low to that during normal times. We find that: 1) USD/GBP and USD/EUR exchange rates have been essentially unaffected by the zero lower bound, 2) yields on German bunds were essentially unconstrained by the zero bound until late 2012, and 3) yields on U.K. gilts were substantially constrained by the zero lower bound in 2009 and 2012, but were surprisingly responsive to news in 2010–11. We compare these findings to the U.S. and discuss their broader implications.     

The interaction between foreigners' trading and emerging stock returns: Evidence from Turkey

Using monthly foreign flows data on Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) and employing a structural VAR model, we analyze the interaction between foreigners' trading and emerging stock returns. In contrast to most of the available theory and repeated previous findings on other markets, foreign investors negative-feedback-trade with respect to past local returns in ISE, however only in rising markets and especially under macroeconomic instability. Net foreign flows forecast future market returns, but not individual stock returns. Price impacts are permanent, suggesting that foreigners' trading incorporates information. Overall, results reject previous conclusions that foreigners are uninformed positive feedback traders: rather, they are a heterogeneous group dominated by sophisticated investors able to rationally adjust their trading style in line with the market's prevailing characteristics.     

Stock market correlations between China and its emerging market neighbors

We examine interlinkages of stock return behavior for China and three emerging market neighbors from the Asia Pacific region from November 1993 to July 2008. Results are based on a VAR model. Impulse responses and vector decomposition of VAR are also utilized. Evidence suggests that the aggregate markets are mostly not interrelated. However, we observe relations between China and the other markets when foreign investor returns are specifically accounted for. In addition, a shock originating in China is significantly felt in the other equity markets. Stock market characteristics and macroeconomic conditions of these countries may help explain the observed relations.     

The trend premium around the world: Evidence from the stock market

This paper studies the predictive power of the trend strategy in the international stock market. Using data from 49 markets, we find that a trend signal exploiting the short-, intermediate-, and long-term price information can predict stock returns cross-sectionally in the international market. The significance of the trend strategy is associated with market-level characteristics such as macroeconomic conditions, culture, and the information environment. The trend premium is more pronounced in markets with a more advanced macroeconomic status, a higher level of information uncertainty and individualism, and better accessibility to foreign investors. Nevertheless, the trend strategy only outperforms the momentum strategy in a relatively short horizon.     

Effects of monetary policy news on financial assets: Evidence from Brazil on a bivariate VAR-GARCH model (2006–17)

The impact of news releases related to the inflation targeting regime on the financial market is analyzed by estimating a bivariate VAR GARCH-BEKK-in-mean model. We use daily data, from January 2006 to May 2017, of stock prices index (IBOVESPA), exchange rate (BRL/USD) and interbank deposit rate (DI360). We developed a positive and negative news index to measure the impact of news releases based on Caporale et al. (2016) and Caporale et al. (2018). Although the literature on the subject is vast, this paper fills relevant gaps in three ways. First, we investigate the bidirectional relationship between monetary policy related news releases and the behavior of asset prices before and after the 2008 crisis in Brazil. Second, we consider the relationship between the second moments of the variables of interest, using the conditional volatility as a proxy for uncertainty. Third, we provide a time series approach to measure the effect of macroeconomic related news releases on financial asset returns. The results indicate there are mean spread effects from news for the exchange rate and the Brazilian stock index: (i) the GARCH-in-mean parameter is statistically significant for positive and the difference of news for the DI360; (ii) monetary policy and external shocks are statiscally significant as expected with exception of the external shocks for the Brazilian stock index; and (iii) there are volatility spillovers and changes of this volatility after the crisis for stock index and DI360.     

Realized bond—stock correlation: Macroeconomic announcement effects

The authors investigate the effects of macroeconomic announcements on the realized correlation between bond and stock returns. It was found that it is not so much the surprise component of the announcement, but the mere fact that an announcement occurs that influences the realized bond—stock correlation. The impact of macroeconomic announcements varies across the business cycle. Announcement effects are highly dependent on the sign of the realized bond—stock correlation, which has recently gone from positive to negative. Macroeconomic announcement effects on realized bond and stock volatilities are also investigated. Our results are robust across 8:30 A.M. and 10:00 A.M. announcements. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 27:439—469, 2007     

What moves the tail? The determinants of the option‐implied probability density function of the DAX index

In this article a study of the option‐implied probability density function (PDF) of German stock returns is presented. The use of option prices allows for the quantification of the risk‐neutral probability of large movements in the DAX index. Using daily data for the period from December 1995 to May 2002, the mixture of log‐normals specification with a constant maturity of 49 days is estimated. The time series behavior of the option‐implied PDF during episodes of market turbulence is discussed at the outset. The main purpose of the study is to consider the relationship of summary measures of the option‐implied PDF to macroeconomic news, information from the U.S. stock market, and risk premia. The results suggest the existence of a significant spillover from the U.S. stock market. Returns and the volatility of U.S. stock prices have a strong effect on changes in the lower DAX tail probability, but also on the higher moments of the option‐implied PDF. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 25:515–536, 2005