We investigate whether structurally hedging the currency risk of global equity products benefits long-term investors. Based on a 35 year back-test of 3 smart beta strategies from 6 currency perspectives, our answer is a qualified “yes”. Currency hedging was effective in reducing risk and...

We find important differences in dollar-based and dollar-neutral G10 carry trades. Dollar-neutral trades have positive average returns, are highly negatively skewed, are correlated with risk factors, and exhibit considerable downside risk. In contrast, a diversified dollar-carry portfolio has a...

In this paper, I study individual currency pairs and examine the behavior of the cross section of their carry returns with the USD. Developed and emerging market carry trades yield high Sharpe ratios even after adjusting for transaction costs. I show that carry trade risks carry trade risks are...

Often, investors fully hedge their portfolios for currency risk. This can lead to significant drag in performance for currencies with negative carry. However, not hedging the foreign currency exposure can lead to significant drawdowns, especially for conservative investments. In this paper, we...

The position of countries in a network of external portfolio investments provides a novel macroeconomic characteristic to explain violations of uncovered interest rate parity. I derive a network centrality measure, where central countries are highly integrated with key suppliers of tradeable...

We sort currencies by countries' consumption growth over the past four quarters. Currency portfolios of countries experiencing consumption booms have higher Sharpe ratios than those of countries going through a consumption-based recession. A carry strategy that goes short in countries that are...

Based on the theory of static replication of variance swaps we assess the sign and magnitude of variance risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. We find significantly negative risk premiums when realized variance is computed from intraday data with low frequency. As a likely consequence of...

This paper provides a new test for whether different-currency assets are imperfect substitutes. The test exploits that under floating rates, changing public currency demand has no direct effect on monetary fundamentals, current or future. Price effects from imperfect substitutability are clearly...

In a regime of floating FX rates and open economies, it is important to understand the way through which FX rates, volatility, and trading volume interrelate. To uncover this, we provide a simple theoretical framework to jointly explore these factors in a multi-currency environment. Through the...

This work studies the information content of trades in the world's largest over-the-counter(OTC) market, the foreign exchange (FX) market. It analyses a novel, comprehensiveorder flow dataset, distinguishing amongst different groups of market participantsand covering a large cross-section of...