IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/anr/refeco/v4y2012p469-495.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Market Microstructure and the Profitability of Currency Trading

Author

Listed:
  • Carol Osler

    (International Business School, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02453)

Abstract

Currency trading is a vast and highly profitable business. This review examines the profitability of two popular currency trading strategies in light of currency-market microstructure research. The carry-trade strategy involves borrowing a low-interest currency and investing the proceeds in a high-interest currency. Technical trading strategies are determined exclusively on the basis of past asset prices and trading volumes. Under the efficient markets hypothesis, neither of these approaches to speculative trading should produce excess returns. The review shows that the profitability of carry-trade investing and technical trading strategies can represent rational long-run equilibria given the structure of currency markets and the incentives and constraints faced by traders.

Suggested Citation

  • Carol Osler, 2012. "Market Microstructure and the Profitability of Currency Trading," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 469-495, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:anr:refeco:v:4:y:2012:p:469-495
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-financial-110311-101726
    Download Restriction: Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chandrinos, Spyros K. & Lagaros, Nikos D., 2018. "Construction of currency portfolios by means of an optimized investment strategy," Operations Research Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 5(C), pages 32-44.
    2. Chang, Ya-Ting & Gau, Yin-Feng & Hsu, Chih-Chiang, 2017. "Liquidity Commonality in Foreign Exchange Markets During the Global Financial Crisis and the Sovereign Debt Crisis: Effects of Macroeconomic and Quantitative Easing Announcements," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 172-192.
    3. Florian El Mouaaouy, 2018. "Financial crime ‘hot spots’ – empirical evidence from the foreign exchange market," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(7-8), pages 565-583, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    carry trade; technical analysis; skewness; liquidity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:anr:refeco:v:4:y:2012:p:469-495. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: http://www.annualreviews.org (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.annualreviews.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.