Posts Tagged ‘Currency’

Capital Inflows and Real Exchange Rate Appreciation – practice

July 6th, 2009

During much of 2000, the National Bank of Poland tightened monetary policy by hiking interest rates to squash inflation. Towards the end of that year, with the NBP’s 28-day intervention rate having peaked at around 19%, nominal and real interest rates peaked, as did inflation. The result was irresistible to fixed income investors, attracted both by extremely high interest yields and the prospect of capital gains. As the NBP began cautiously to relax its monetary policy, this triggered an increasing tide of capital inflows. Asset managers reduced or even eliminated their currency hedges. Dedicated emerging market investors raised their asset allocation in Polish bonds, while cross-over investors increased their exposure to what was an off-index investment.

Trend-Following Strategy

July 3rd, 2009

A second popular strategy for active currency managers is the “trend-following” strategy, which involves using several technical moving averages to provide trading or hedging signals. Active currency managers can use this strategy to either trade around their benchmark in order to add alpha, or alternatively to provide a hedging signal. The academic backing for trend-following strategies is as deep as that for the differential forward strategy, including works by Bilson (1990, 1993), Taylor (1990), LeBaron (1991) and Levich and Thomas (1993), which showed that these strategies can indeed produce consistent excess returns over sustained periods of time. I would suggest however that the seminal breakthrough in this area came in the form of the note by Lequeux and Acar (1998), which gave the strategy more specific properties by suggesting that in order to be representative of the various durations followed by investors an equally weighted portfolio based on three moving averages of 32, 61 and 117 days would be most appropriate. Simply put, the core idea behind this strategy is to go long the currency pair when the price is above a moving average of a given length and to go short the currency pair when it is below. More specifically, if the spot exchange rate is above all three moving averages, hedge the foreign currency exposure 100%. If it is above only two out of the three moving averages, hedge one-third of the position. In all other cases, leave the position unhedged.