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This paper empirically examines how dispersions across investors beliefs influence traders order submission decisions in the foreign exchange market. Previous research has found that dispersion in traders beliefs regarding future macroeconomic announcements has a significant impact on both price dynamics and trading volume before the announcements in the foreign exchange and other financial markets. However, little is known about how this dispersion impacts traders choice in submitting different types of orders and thus to supply and demand liquidity either before or after such announcements. Since the types of orders submitted by traders at these times are the building blocks of the observed price and trading dynamics, it is important to understand how differences in investors' information sets before and after important macroeconomic announcements affect their order submission decisions. We find that (i) belief dispersion affects the size and aggressiveness of orders both before and after macroeconomic announcements, (ii) the magnitude of the impact of factors known to affect order choice depends on the level of belief dispersion, and (iii) the influence of information shocks (the revelation of unexpected information) on order choices depends on the level of belief dispersion., Les auteurs examinent empiriquement comment la dispersion des croyances des investisseurs influence le choix des ordres que ceux-ci passent sur le marché des changes. D'après les travaux antérieurs, la dispersion des attentes quant aux nouvelles macroéconomiques à venir a une nette incidence sur la dynamique des prix et le volume des transactions sur le marché des changes et les autres marchés financiers à l'approche de l'annonce de données macroéconomiques. Cependant, on ignore presque tout des effets que peut avoir cette dispersion sur le choix du type d'ordre et donc sur l'offre et la demande de liquidité avant et après de telles annonces. Comme la nature des ordres passés à ces moments-là explique une large part de la dynamique observée des prix et des transactions, il importe de saisir comment l'hétérogénéité des informations dont disposent les investisseurs avant et après la publication de nouvelles macroéconomiques majeures influe sur leurs décisions. Les auteurs concluent que : 1) la dispersion des croyances a une incidence sur la taille et la compétitivité des ordres tant avant qu'après les annonces d'ordre macroéconomique; 2) l'ampleur de l'effet des facteurs qui ont une action avérée sur le choix des ordres est fonction du degré de dispersion des croyances; 3) l'influence des chocs d'information (la révélation de renseignements inattendus) sur le choix des ordres dépend elle aussi du degré de dispersion des croyances.

In this paper, I analyze determinants of carry trade returns in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). I show that carry trades to CEE were lucrative due to interest rate spreads between the funding and investment currency from 2004 to 2006. They became unprofitable when liquidity risk and exchange rate volatility increased after 2007. The analysis suggests that the exchange rate regime of the CEE economy matters for carry trade returns. Overall, exchange rate stabilization, particularly via managed floats, seems to allow for the highest profit opportunities.

This paper proposes an explanation of the shifts in the volatility of exchange rate returns that relies on standard present value exchange rate models. Agents are uncertain about the true data generating model and deal with the model uncertainty by making inference on the models and their parameters - a mechanism I call model learning. I show how model learning may lead agents to focus excessively on a subset of fundamental variables. As a result, exchange rate volatility is mainly determined by the dynamics of this subset of fundamentals. As agents switch between models the nominal exchange rate volatility varies accordingly even though the underlying fundamentals processes remain time-invariant. I investigate the relevance of this result empirically within the Taylor-rule based exchange rate model applied to the British Pound/US Dollar exchange rate. The results suggest that the observed change in volatility was triggered by a shift between models.

There are no established benchmarks for evaluating currency investment manager performance. Some analysts have suggested that known investing styles like momentum, purchasing power parity, and carry serve as benchmarks. Challenges for this approach include: there is no market portfolio; there are many alternative generic factor constructions; different constructions of the same factor may have low correlations; the 3 factors may not provide diversification; and there is no buy and hold in the FX market. An evaluation of professional currency managers' returns indicates that they are often generated independently from the generic style factors. Skill in timing is what investors should pay for and some managers demonstrate superior skill in timing the factors. Managers are also skilled at minimizing drawdowns relative to the generic factors. The use of generic style factors may be a worst case scenario instead of returns to which an FX investor may aspire.

What is the role of large players” like hedge funds and other highly leveraged institutions in speculative attacks? In recent theoretical work, large players may induce an attack by an early move, providing information to smaller agents. In contrast, many observers argue that large players are in the rear. We propose a model that allows both the large player to move early in order to induce speculation by small players, or wait so as to benefit from a high interest rate prior to the attack. Using data on net positions of large” (foreigners) and small” (locals) players, we find that large players moved last in three attacks on the Norwegian krone (nok) during the 1990s: The ERM-crisis of 1992, the NOK-pressure in 1997, and after the Russian moratorium in 1998. In 1998 there was a contemporaneous attack on the Swedish krona (sek) in which large players moved early. Interest rates did not increase in Sweden so there was little to gain by a delayed attack.

Though unambiguously outperforming all other financial markets in terms of liquidity, foreign exchange trading is still performed in opaque and decentralized markets. In particular, the two-tier market structure consisting of a customer segment and an interdealer segment to which only market makers have access gives rise to the possibility of price discrimination. We provide a theoretical foreign exchange pricing model that accounts for market power considerations and analyze a database of the trades of a German market maker and his cross section of end-user customers. We find that the market maker generally exerts low bargaining power vis-á-vis his customers. The dealer earns lower average spreads on trades with financial customers than commercial customers, even though the former are perceived to convey exchange-rate-relevant information. From this perspective, it appears that market makers provide interdealer market liquidity to end-user customers with cross-sectionally differing spreads.

This paper illustrates that dealers in foreign exchange markets not only provide intraday liquidity, they are key participants in the provision of overnight liquidity. Dealing institutions receive compensation for holding undesired inventory balances in part from the information they receive in customer trades. These flows can be used to forecast future movements in the exchange rate. Findings suggest that Canadian dealers, as a group and individually, are more likely to provide interday liquidity to foreign rather than Canadian financial customers. Financial institutions operating in multiple price-correlated markets manage their risky positions across markets. An interdependent relationship is revealed between the supply of liquidity provided by non-financial firms and dealing institutions across time, and across markets., Comme l'auteur le montre, les institutions actives sur les marchés des changes ne font pas qu'assurer la liquidité durant la journée : elles jouent aussi un rôle important dans la fourniture de liquidité au-delà d'un jour. Les coûts liés au maintien de positions non désirées sont contrebalancés en partie par l'information tirée des transactions avec la clientèle. Cette information peut en effet aider à prévoir les variations du taux de change. D'après les résultats présentés, les cambistes canadiens seraient, tant collectivement qu'à titre individuel, plus enclins à procurer de la liquidité au-delà d'un jour à leurs clients lorsque ceux-ci sont établis à l'étranger. Les institutions financières assurant la tenue de multiples marchés dont les cours sont corrélés gèrent leurs positions risquées sur plusieurs marchés à la fois. L'auteur met en lumière l'interdépendance des activités d'apport de liquidité des institutions financières et des entreprises non financières, aussi bien dans le temps que sur les différents marchés.

Our goal in this project is to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements. To this end, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exchange rate indices are insufficient to understand the financial impact of currency movements. We show that our currency measure has high explanatory power for the valuation term in net foreign asset dynamics: exchange rate valuation shocks are sizable, not quickly reversed and may entail substantial wealth redistributions. Further, we demonstrate that many developing countries hold short foreign-currency positions, leaving them open to negative valuation effects when the domestic currency depreciates. However, we also show that many of these countries have substantially reduced their foreign currency exposure over the last decade.

We develop a panel intensity model, with a time varying latent factor, which captures the influence of unobserved time effects and allows for correlation across individuals. The model is designed to analyze individual trading behavior on the basis of trading activity datasets, which are characterized by four dimensions: an irregularly-spaced time scale, trading activity types, trading instruments and investors. Our approach extends the stochastic conditional intensity model of Bauwens & Hautsch (2006) to panel duration data.We show how to estimate the model parameters by a simulated maximum likelihood technique adopting the efficient importance sampling approach of Richard & Zhang (2005). We provide an application to a trading activity dataset from an internet trading platform in the foreign exchange market and we find support for the presence of behavioral biases and discuss implications for portfolio theory.

We extend the model by DeGrauwe and Grimaldi (2006, EER) by currency transaction taxes. This model explains the exchange rate behavior by the interaction of heterogeneous traders who display either trend chasing behavior or rely on a return of the exchange rate back to its arbitrage free fundamental value. Within this model framework we can show analytically that the steady-state of the original model is unaffected by the transaction tax rate. We inferred from numerical simulations that the transaction tax is able to reduce the number of speculative equilibria to zero. Moreover, we show that the tax will lead to a faster convergence of the system back to its fundamental steady state.

In this paper we provide evidence for Evans and Lyons' (2005b) model of an information aggregation process in FX markets using a German bank's end-user order flow from 2002 to 2003. Though customer order flow is unambiguously the vehicle incorporating non-public information into exchange rates over time, our empirical analysis does not support the widespread optimism in the market microstructure literature that customer order flow is the high-powered source of information easily exploitable for short-run speculation. Moreover, commercial customers' order flow produces negative coefficients in contemporaneous return regressions, stressing their role as liquidity providers.

This paper analyzes the relationship between currency price changes and their expectations. Currency price change expectations are derived with the help of different order flow measures, from the trading behavior of investors on OANDA FXTrade, which is an internet trading platform in the foreign exchange market. We investigate whether forecasts of intra-day price changes on different sampling frequencies can be improved with the information contained in the flow of our investors' orders. Moreover, we verify several hypotheses on the trading behavior and the preference structure of our investors by investigating how past price changes affect future order flow.

Trades in foreign exchange markets are initiated around the world and around the clock. This study illustrates that trades are more informative when initiated in a local country or in major foreign exchange centers like London and New York. Evidence suggests that informational asymmetries based on geography arise from the market making capacity of dealers and the customer order flow that dealers capture during regional business hours. Findings also show that market orders initiated in price-correlated FX markets are not informative. Transparency in quotes on electronic trading platforms may prevent informed participants from exploiting information across FX markets. Overall, these results are robust across different market conditions., Vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre, des opérations de change sont engagées aux quatre coins du monde. L'auteur montre que ces opérations renseignent davantage lorsqu'elles sont amorcées dans un pays dont la monnaie fait l'objet des transactions ou sur une grande place financière comme Londres ou New York. Certains éléments donnent à penser que les asymétries d'information associées aux lieux géographiques s'expliquent par la taille des transactions que peuvent conclure les cambistes et par les flux d'ordres qu'ils parviennent à capter pendant les heures ouvrables dans leur région d'attache. Les résultats obtenus montrent en outre que les ordres au mieux placés sur des marchés dont les prix sont corrélés n'apportent aucune information nouvelle. La transparence des cours indiqués sur les plateformes de négociation électronique peut dissuader les agents bien renseignés d'exploiter sur d'autres marchés des changes leurs informations. Dans l'ensemble, les résultats se vérifient sous différentes conditions de marché.

We propose a new model of chartist-fundamentalist-interaction in which both groups of traders are allowed to select endogenously between different forecasting models and different investment horizons. Stochastic interest rates in both countries and different behavioral assumptions for trend-extrapolating and fundamental based forecasts determine the agents' market orders which drive the exchange rate. A numerical analysis of the model shows that it is able to replicate stylized facts of observed financial return time series like excess kurtosis and volatility clustering. Within this framework we study the effects of transaction taxes on exchange rate volatility and traders' behavior measured by their population fractions. Simula- tions yield the result that on the macroscopic level these taxes reduce the variance of exchange rate returns, but also increase their kurtosis. Moreover, on the microscopic level the tax harms short-term speculation in favor of long-term investment, while it also harms trading rules based on economic fundamentals in favor to trend extrapolating trading rules.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of central bank interventions (CBI) in a noise trading model with chartists and fundamentalists. We first estimate a model in which chartists extrapolate past returns and fundamentalists forecast a mean reverting dynamics of the exchange rate towards a fundamental value. Then, we investigate the role of central bank interventions for explaining the switching properties between the two types of agents. We find evidence that in the medium run, interventions increase the proportion of fundamentalists and therefore exert some stabilzing influence on the exchange rate.

A number of empirical studies have reported the result that exchange rates show a delayed overshooting in response to monetary policy shocks. This result is puzzling. Economic theory suggests that the overshooting should occur immediately after the shock, not with a delay. This paper uses a ?new open economy macroeconomics? model with pricing-to-market to analyze whether the assumption of noise trading in the foreign exchange market helps to resolve the delayed overshooting puzzle. The implications of noise trading for the effects of monetary policy shocks on the nominal and on the real exchange rate are analyzed.

In this paper, I provide evidence that currency stop-loss orders contribute to rapid, self-reinforcing price movements, or price cascades. Stop-loss orders, which instruct a dealer to buy (sell) a certain amount of currency at the market rate once the rate has risen (fallen) to a prespecified level, generate positive-feedback trading. Theoretical research on the 1987 stock market crash suggests that such trading can cause price discontinuities, which would manifest themselves as price cascades. My analysis of high-frequency exchange rates offers three main results that provide empirical support for the hypothesis that stop-loss orders contribute to price cascades: (1) Exchange rate trends are unusually rapid when rates reach exchange rate levels at which stop-loss order have been documented to cluster. (2) The response to stop-loss orders is larger than the response to take-profit orders, which generate negative-feedback trading and are therefore unlikely to contribute to price cascades. (3) The response to stop-loss orders lasts longer than the response to take-profit orders. Most results are statistically significant for hours, although not for days. Together, these results indicate that stop-loss orders propagate trends and are sometimes triggered in waves, contributing to price cascades. Stop-loss propagated price cascades may help explain the well-known fat tails of the distribution of exchange rate returns, or equivalently the high frequency of large exchange rate moves. The paper also provides evidence that exchange rates respond to noninformative order flow.

Recent research point to the possible existence of private information in foreign exchange markets. Dealers claim that customer orders are their most important source of private information, and that banks with a large customer base have a competitive advantage. In this paper we test hypotheses on effects of private information using observations on customer trades, and the identity of the counterparties the dealers trade with. We find that customer trades influence the trading decision. Neither customer trades nor counterparty identity affect pricing decisions. Dealers do not price discriminate between dealers, but they do price discriminate customers. Spreads to customers are wider than to other dealers.

The introduction of electronic broker systems in the foreign exchange (FX) market at the end of 1992 changed the structure of the market and opened new channels for trading. We study the impact of these systems on dealer behavior, using a unique data set on the complete transactions of four FX dealers. We find some support for an information effect in incoming trades conducted directly (bilaterally). For trades executed by electronic broker systems we find no information effects, but we find that sequences of trades in cumulative flow may be informative for prices. The new electronic systems have changed how dealers control their inventories by introducing new channels for this purpose. We find that dealers now control inventory by outgoing trades on electronic brokers, while outgoing trades earlier was regarded as unattractive for inventory control. Comparing our results to previous research indicates that the introduction of electronic brokers have changed the behavior of dealers.

A contingent claims valuation model which allows to highlight the implications of program trading in spot markets for the pricing of European-style foreign currency options and for the volatility strike structure implicit in these contracts is devoloped. The curvature of the volatility strike structure is explained by focusing attention on the expected aggregate net volume and direction of standing orders executed when the exchange rate reaches certain implicit price barriers triggering program traders to reallocate financial wealth. The valuation framework allows to endogenously reproduce the characteristic convex shape of volatility strike structures documented in the empirical literature. A volatility-based test for implicit price barriers in foreign exchange markets is employed to examine whether empirical evidence supports the barriers hypothesis of the volatility strike structure proposed in the paper.