Tag: Informed trading

Predicting exchange rates

Robert Czech, Pasquale Della Corte, Shiyang Huang and Tianyu Wang

Can investors predict future foreign exchange (FX) rates? Many economists would say that this is an incredibly difficult task, given the weak link between exchange rate fluctuations and the state of an economy – a phenomenon also known as the ‘exchange rate disconnect puzzle’. In a recent paper, we show that some investors in the ‘FX option market’ are indeed able to accurately forecast exchange rate returns, particularly in periods with strong demand for the US dollar. These informed trades primarily take place on days with macroeconomic announcements and in options with higher embedded leverage. We also find that two groups of investors – hedge funds and real money investors – have superior skills in predicting exchange rates.

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Informed trading in government bond markets

Robert Czech, Shiyang Huang, Dong Lou and Tianyu Wang

Government bond yields serve as a benchmark for virtually all other rates in financial markets. But what factors drive these yields? One view is that yields only move notably when important news hit the market, for example monetary policy announcements. Others suspect that some investors have an information advantage due to their access to costly information (e.g. data providers) or more accurate interpretations of public information. In a recent paper, we show that two investor groups – hedge funds and mutual funds – have an information edge in the UK government bond (gilt) market, and that these two investor types operate through different trading strategies and over different horizons.

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