Reported and secret interventions in the foreign exchange markets

Using a new approach relying on news wire reports, we estimate the proportion of secret interventions (i.e., unreported official interventions) in the foreign exchange markets that have been conducted by the three major central banks since 1985. We therefore revisit the estimation of conditional probabilities of secret operations and compute them by both central bank and operation type. The proportion of secret interventions is found to be lower for concerted operations and to display a great deal of variability over time as well as across the three major central banks. Our analysis reveals that the Bank of Japan has recently adopted an intervention policy more based on secret operations.     

The day-of-the-week effect in conditional correlation

The day-of-the-week effect in the first and second moments of the return distribution is a well researched area. However, not many studies have attempted to identify this effect in the comovement or correlation of the markets. This paper models the day-of-the-week effect in the returns and the conditional correlation for some Asia-Pacific equity markets. The paper finds a Monday, Wednesday and Friday effects in the returns for some of the markets. The effect is totally absent in the returns for Australia, Japan and Korea. For the fifteen conditional correlation series estimated, a predominant Tuesday effect is detected for five series. Three series exhibit a Monday effect. A Thursday effect is detected between the Singapore market and the markets of Australia, Hong Kong and Thailand. The paper finds no consistent day-of-the-week effect in the returns and the correlations for this region. JEL Classification G15 · G14     

Tick test accuracy in foreign exchange ECN markets

Recent computer quoting activity has increased the allure of the tick test because the quote rule and its variants require matching asynchronous trade and quote records. We find tick test accuracy of 1.2 million forex trades is about 67% which falls to 63% for zerotick trades (half the sample). Accuracy declines as quoted spreads decrease and as time to the previous trade increases. We observe extreme asymmetry for midquote changes, where buyer accuracy is 96% (27%) for up (down) changes, respectively. The quote rule is about 77% accurate. The group tick test is superior to the bulk volume classification method.     

Price clustering in foreign exchange spot markets

This paper documents the existence of price clustering in the foreign exchange spot market for the German mark, the Japanese yen, the United Kingdom pound, the French franc, the Italian lira, and the Swedish krona. The U.S. dollar exchange rate indicative quotes for these currencies tend to exhibit clustering around right-most digits that end in either a “zero” or a “five.” The tendency for exchange rates to cluster has increased with increases in trading volume and volatility. Moreover, the tendency for exchange rates to cluster differs across currencies.     

High frequency correlation dynamics and day-of-the-week effect: A score-driven approach in an emerging market stock exchange

Intraday correlation dynamics poses challenges to financial econometricians, especially in recently popular high frequency domain, due to non-synchronous trading and market microstructure noise. Traditional models fail to address the issues inherent to the nature of the data, which is riddled with noisy signals and missing values. We employ a recently developed method based on Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) framework and State-Space Modeling to remedy these characteristics of high frequency data and estimate intraday correlations in Turkish equity market Borsa Istanbul. Our findings reveal that average intraday conditional correlation rises as trading commences and lingers around certain altitude for some time, with the eigenvalues associated with market factor becoming progressively more dominant. An upward trend closes out the trading day on Mondays, which we attribute to the US market opening, whereas the rest of the week does not show a generalizable closing-time effect. Assessment of the findings across different market conditions and days of the week reveals elevated correlation levels in volatile markets as well as a distinguishable path for the beginning of the week. Beyond the scholarly contribution, the methodology can be used as a nowcasting tool and the findings are of interest to various parties like high-frequency traders, risk and portfolio managers and regulatory agencies in formulating their high frequency trading practices, hedging, portfolio construction schemes and margin requirements, respectively.     

Large versus small foreign exchange interventions

We use non-temporal threshold analysis to investigate the exchange rate effects of large versus small interventions. More than two decades of official daily data on intervention in the JPY/USD market facilitate our analysis. We find no evidence that small interventions exert a discernible influence on the exchange rate while large interventions significantly influence the exchange rate in the theoretically consistent manner. We conclude that small interventions may not be considered a determinant of the exchange rate while large interventions constitute an important element in our understanding, and modeling, of the exchange rate.     

Presidential administrations and the day-of-the-week effect in stock returns

This study examines the presence of a day-of-the-week effect over different presidential administrations. The results indicate that the day-of-the-week effect prevails during the Democratic and Republican administrations. However, the pattern of the day-of-the-week effect differs between the two presidential administrations. Specifically, the negative returns on Monday are more pronounced during the Republican than during the Democratic administrations. Therefore, explanations for the day-of-the-week effect should take into account the changing pattern of the day-of-the-week effect across presidential administrations.     

The interrelatedness of global equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets

This article investigates different aspects of global financial markets, specifically relationships among equity markets, money markets, and foreign exchange markets across countries. To represent the three major financial markets of the world, Japan is the proxy for Asia, Germany is the proxy for Europe, and the United States is the proxy for North America. Strong evidence exists that international money markets and international equity markets are becoming increasingly integrated over time. This article incorporates foreign exchange values as partial determinants of equity returns and money market returns and investigates the interactions among these three asset markets from a global perspective.     

Explaining the accounting disclosure index of stock exchanges by foreign exchange market activity

In this article, researcher-created accounting disclosure index of 23 stock exchanges for the year 1992 and its relationship with variables including foreign exchange turnover, economic and financial indicators were investigated. The accounting disclosure index of global stock exchanges crafted by Adhikari and Tondkar (1992) was regressed on foreign market turnover which was utilized as a proxy for foreign exchange market activity. The OLS results supported that along with the activity of foreign exchange market; GNI per capita, market capitalization, energy and electric consumption, number of listed companies were significantly related with the accounting disclosure index. The foreign market turnover was found to be positively influencing the accounting disclosure index. The models explained about 73% of the variation in the index with an F-ratio of 26.56 indicating the overall significance of the model.     

Price discovery in foreign exchange markets: A comparison of indicative and actual transaction prices

In this paper, we compare four months of Reuters EFX high frequency indicative data with D2000-1 inter-dealer transaction data for DEM/USD and GBP/USD. Contrary to previous studies, we find, using various information measures, that the matched tick-by-tick indicative data bear no qualitative difference from the transaction data, and have higher information content. Expanding the system to include order flow, due to its growing importance in exchange rate theory, we find that indicative data has a similar impact on order flow as transaction data. However, order flow has no impact on either price.     

Conditional volatility persistence and volatility spillovers in the foreign exchange market

I investigate the magnitudes and determinants of volatility spillovers in the foreign exchange (FX) market, using realized measures of volatility and heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models. I confirm both meteor shower effects (i.e., inter-regional volatility spillovers) and heat wave effects (i.e., intra-regional volatility spillovers) in the FX market. Furthermore, I find that conditional volatility persistence is the dominant channel linking the changing market states of each region to future volatility and its spillovers. Market state variables contribute to more than half of the explanatory power in predicting conditional volatility persistence, with the model that calibrates volatility persistence and spillovers conditionally on market states performing statistically and economically better. The utilization of market state variables significantly extends our understanding of the economic mechanisms of volatility persistence and spillovers and sheds new light on econometric techniques for volatility modeling and forecasting.     

Market structure and dealers’ quoting behavior in the foreign exchange market

This article examines how differently the same dealer quotes in the inter-dealer and customer foreign exchange markets that have different market structures. The model first predicts that customer spreads are generally wider than inter-dealer ones due to less transparency in the customer market. The model also predicts that since customers are believed to be less informed than dealers, the differential between customer and inter-dealer spreads tends to fall with the rise in order sizes. In addition, the dealer's mid-quotes are shown to be the same in the two markets. Empirical evidence based on data collected from a FX dealer supports these theoretical findings.     

Emerging markets and portfolio foreign exchange risk: An empirical investigation using a value-at-risk decomposition technique

The correlation between a portfolio's equity and foreign exchange components plays a role in reducing foreign exchange exposure. Investors must account for this correlation when determining the extent of foreign exchange risk in emerging market equity portfolio investments. This study employs a VaR risk factor mapping technique, under the variance–covariance VaR approach, to decompose portfolio risk in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia. For comparison purposes, the same technique is used to decompose portfolio risk in the US. The study is conducted from the perspective of a European equity investor with a portfolio of equities in each country. By employing the VaR decomposition technique, the correlation between a portfolio's equity and foreign exchange components is taken into account and portfolio foreign exchange risk is extracted from portfolio systematic risk. Our results uniquely demonstrate significant variation in foreign exchange risk in emerging markets.     

Valuing foreign exchange rate derivatives with a bounded exchange process

Foreign exchange rates have been subjected to periods of tighter or looser controls as various political and economic forces have waxed and waned. When currencies were backed by gold there were fixed exchange rates. In 1973 floating exchange rates were adopted though many countries did try to keep their currency values within certain ranges. More recently the European Economic Community formalized this practice. Free-floating exchange rates might be well characterized by the lognormal distribution which is standard in option pricing. However, this is probably a poor approximation for exchange rates which are kept within some range by the actions of one or both governments or central banks. This paper develops a model which can be used to value options and other derivative contracts when the underlying exchange rate is bounded in a fixed range (a, b). Methods for pricing both European and American style options are developed.The author would like to thank Ken French and Geert Rouwenhorst for their comments and suggestions.     

Measuring liquidity commonality in financial markets

This paper contributes to the literature by developing a new methodology, termed the beta index, for measuring liquidity commonality in financial markets which is derived from the dynamics of liquidity co-movements. We show that computing the beta index is a straightforward process. In addition, not only is the proposed beta index more efficient in controlling for confounding factors and addressing the associated statistical inference issues, but it will also enhance the accuracy of estimation. We apply the beta index to track liquidity commonality in the foreign exchange markets over the study period and to identify important financial and economic events that caused liquidity commonality. We detect periods of high and low liquidity commonalities that would especially benefit active market traders who frequently rebalance portfolios and require knowledge of liquidity commonality as an important early signal and indication of diversification benefit.     

Foreign exchange intervention and equilibrium real exchange rates

Monetary authorities intervene in the currency markets in order to pursue a monetary rule and/or to smooth exchange rate volatility caused by speculative attacks. In the present paper we investigate for possible intervention effects on the volatility of nominal exchange rates and the estimated equilibrium behaviour of real exchange rates. The main argument of the paper is that omission of intervention effects – when they are significant – would bias the ability to detect any PPP-based behaviour of the real exchange rates in the long run. Positive evidence for this argument comes from the experience of six Central and Eastern European economies, whose exchange markets are characterised by frequent interventions.     

The analysis of foreign exchange data using waveform dictionaries

This paper uses waveform dictionaries to decompose the signals contained within three foreign exchange rates using tick-by-tick observations obtained world wide. The three exchange rates examined are the Japanese Yen and the German Deutsche Mark against the U.S. dollar and the Deutsche Mark against the Yen. The data were provided by Olsen Associates.A wabeform dictionary is a class of transforms that generalizes both windowed Fourier transforms and wavelets. Each waveform is parameterized by location, frequency, and scale. Such transforms can analyze signals that have highly localized structures in either time or frequency space as well as broad band structures; that is, waveforms can, in principle, detect everything from shocks represented by Dirac Delta functions, to short bursts of energy within a narrow band of frequencies, to the presence of frequencies that occur sporadically, and finally to the presence of frequencies that hold over the entire observed period. Waveform dictionaries are most useful in analyzing data that are not stationary and non-stationarity up to second order is well recognized in the context of foreign exchange rates.     

The exchange rate effect of multi-currency risk arbitrage

Carry trade arbitrage strategies typically involve multiple currencies. Limits to arbitrage in such a setting not only slow the adjustment to the fundamental equilibrium, but can also generate transitory over- or undershooting of each exchange rate in accordance with the marginal risk contribution of each speculative position to the overall arbitrage risk. The paper uses a natural experiment to identify a particular global arbitrage opportunity and shows that arbitrage risk hedging modifies the exchange rate dynamics in the predicted manner. New spectral methods are applied to obtain a more precise inference on the cross-sectional trading pattern of the arbitrageurs.     

Macroeconomic announcements and price discovery in the foreign exchange market

This study shows that the dominance of the overlapping trading hours of London and New York in the price discovery of the EUR/USD and USD/JPY markets only applies on days with U.S. announcements. Different from Cai et al. (2008) and Wang and Yang (2011), we highlight the informational advantage of local traders at the arrival of macroeconomic announcements in the local market, and find that macroeconomic announcements affect the pattern of price discovery across different markets, consistent with Chen and Gau (2010) and Jiang et al. (2012). We also examine changes in information shares before and after the announcement. A significant increase in price discovery before the announcement suggests the possibility of information leakage, while enhanced price discovery efficacy after the announcement suggests that prices gradually adjust to new information, not just immediately respond to the arrival of announcements.     

Information and volatility links in the foreign exchange market

We apply the trading model of Fleming et al (1998 ). to a number of currency markets. The model posits that two markets can have common volatility structures as a result of receiving common information and from cross‐hedging activity where a position in one currency is used to hedge risk in a position taken in another. Our results imply that the model is effective in identifying common information flows and volatility spillovers in the currency markets and that some of these effects are lost when simply examining raw correlations. A series of specification tests of the 21 bivariate systems that are examined provides support for the trading model in the foreign exchange context.