Dagfinn Rime

Foreign Exchange Market Structure, Players and Evolution

Electronic trading has transformed foreign exchange markets over the past decade, and the pace of innovation only accelerates. This formerly opaque market is now fairly transparent and transaction costs are only a fraction of their former level. Entirely new agents have joined the fray, including retail and high-frequency traders, while foreign exchange trading volumes have tripled. Market concentration among dealers has risen reflecting the heavy investments in technology. Undeterred, some new non-bank market participants have begun to make markets, challenging the traditional foreign exchange dealers on their own turf. This paper outlines the players in this market and the structure of their interactions. It also presents new evidence on how that structure has changed over the past two decades. Throughout, it highlights issues relevant to exchange rate modelling.

Private or Public Information in Foreign Exchange Markets? An Empirical Analysis

In macroeconomic models exchange rates are determined by public information. Trading activities are completely irrelevant. In general, these models have low explanatory power for short horizons, which might be due to the possible existence of private information. Dealers in the foreign exchange market consider the order flow from customers to be the most important source of private information. I test a microstructural trading model incorporating private information, including both order flow and macroeconomic variables. The results show that order flow is an important variable for explaining weekly changes in exchange rates, thereby indicating an important role for private information.

Asymmetric Information in the Interbank Foreign Exchange Market

This paper provides evidence of private information in the interdealer foreign exchange market. In so doing it provides support for the hypothesis that information is an important reason for the strong positive correlation between order flow and returns. It also provides evidence that information influences order-book structure. Our data comprise the complete record of interdealer trades at a good-sized Scandinavian bank during four weeks in 1998 and 1999, including bank identities. Our results indicate that larger banks have more information than smaller banks, that the relation between order flow and returns is stronger for larger banks than smaller banks, and that larger banks exploit their information advantage in limit-order placement.

U.S. Exchange Rates and Currency Flows

After the Meese & Rogoff 1983-results, researchers have searched with torch for macroeconomic variables with predictive power on horizons shorter than 6 months. Recently, several papers have showed that order flows influence exchange rates intradaily. Maybe order flow may be of importance also for lower frequencies than intraday, like the weekly frequency? In this paper I test a trading model where order flow may be informative due to the existence of private information, and where there are important macroeconomic public information as well. Using weekly data for spot and options trading in the U.S., the model is tested for five exchange rates against US Dollar. For three of the exchange rates, DEM/USD, GBP/USD and CHF/USD, I find that order flow is an important variable for explaining weekly changes in exchange rates. The coefficients are both statistically and economically significant, and have intuitive sign. When U.S. banks sell foreign currency, the foreign currency depreciates.

FX Trading... LIVE! Dealer Behavior and Trading Systems in Foreign Exchange Markets

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 infomative for prices. The new electronic systems have changed how dealers control their inventories by introducing new channels for this purpose. Dealers use outgoing trades on electronic brokers to control inventory. Comparing our results to previous research indicates that the introduction of electronic brokers have changed the behavior of dealers.

Segmented Money Markets and Covered Interest Parity Arbitrage

We show that it is crucial to account for the heterogeneity in funding costs, both across banks and across currency areas, in order to understand recently documented deviations from Covered Interest Parity (CIP). When CIP arbitrage is implemented accounting for marginal funding costs and realistic risk-free investment instruments, the no-arbitrage relation holds fairly well for the majority of market participants. A narrow set of global high-rated banks, however, does enjoy riskless arbitrage opportunities. Such arbitrage opportunities emerge as an equilibrium outcome as FX swap dealers set prices to avoid inventory imbalances. Low-rated banks find it attractive to turn to the FX swap market to cover their U.S. dollar funding, while swap dealers elicit opposite (arbitrage) flows by high-rated banks. Such arbitrage opportunities are difficult to scale, with funding rates adjusting as soon as arbitrageurs increase their positions.

Micro approaches to foreign exchange determination

Micro-based exchange-rate research examines the determination and behavior of spot exchange rates in an environment that replicates the key features of trading in the foreign exchange (FX) market. Traditional macro exchange-rate models play little attention to how trading in the FX market actually takes place. The implicit assumption is that the details of trading are unimportant for the behavior of exchange rates over months, quarters or longer. Micro-based models, by contrast, examine how information relevant to the pricing of FX becomes reflected in the spot exchange rate via the trading process. According to this view, trading is not an ancillary market activity that can be ignored when considering exchange-rate behavior. Rather, trading is an integral part of the process through which spot rates are determined and evolve. The past decade of micro-based research has uncovered a robust and strong empirical relation between exchange rates and measures of FX trading activity. One measure in particular, order flow (i.e., the net of buyer- and seller-initiated FX trades) appears as the proximate driver of exchange-rate changes over horizons ranging from a few minutes to a few months. This finding supports the view that trading is an integral part of exchange-rate determination. It also stands in stark contrast to the well-known deficiencies of macro models in accounting for exchange-rate variations over horizons shorter than a couple of years. In this paper we provide an overview of micro-based research on exchange-rate determination. We survey both models focusing on partial equilibrium, the traditional domain of microstructure research, and recent research that focuses on the link between currency trading and macroeconomic conditions in the general equilibrium setting of modern macroeconomic models. We believe micro-based research is making some progress towards understanding the links between macroeconomic conditions and the behavior of exchange rates over macro- and policy-relevant horizons.

The Flows of the Pacific: Asian Foreign Exchange Markets through Tranquility and Turbulence

Using the longest data set on FX order flow to date, along with the broadest coverage of currencies to date, we examine the effect of FX order flow on exchange rates across small and large currencies, currencies with floating or fixed regimes, and across both tranquil and turbulent periods. Over our 15 years of data for eleven Asian and Australasian currencies, we find that order flow has a potentially strong impact on all exchange rates in the sample. The effect is strongest on floating exchange rates, both economically and statistically, but is sizeable also on the other exchange rates, especially during periods of turbulence. By creating a measure of regional order flow, we show that all exchange rates depreciate as flows are moved out of Asia/Australasia and into US dollars. This is true both across regimes and if their own flow is not included in the structure of the regional flow.

Herding the Scapegoats: Foreign Exchange Order Flow and the Time-Varying Effect of Fundamentals

The poor performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models in and out-of-sample is well documented in literature. One reason for this result is the impact of ‘scapegoat’ effects: that is, participants attach different weights to different macro fundamentals in different periods. On the other hand, microstructure approaches to exchange rate determination demonstrate the importance of order flow to both explain and forecast exchange rates. Monthly data sets for order flow on the three currency pairs

The Impact of Different Players on the Volume-Volatility Relation in the Foreign Exchange Market

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