IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34588.html

Topography of the FX Derivatives Market: A View from London

Author

Listed:
  • Sinem Hacioglu Hoke
  • Daniel A. Ostry
  • Hélène Rey
  • Adrien Rousset Planat
  • Vania Stavrakeva
  • Jenny Tang

Abstract

Drawing on 100 million transactions, we show how speculators, hedgers, and market makers interact in the world’s largest FX derivatives market, and that derivatives trading can affect exchange rates. Firms in the largest client sectors—pension and investment funds, insurers, and nonfinancials—use FX derivatives primarily to hedge currency risk, with dealer banks providing the liquidity. Hedge funds, with comparatively smaller net exposures, trade speculatively, whereas dealer banks insulate themselves from changes in speculative demand by taking offsetting positions with hedgers, especially nonfinancials. Non-bank market makers, instead, take residual exchange-rate exposures “on the margin”. Hedge funds’ speculative flows help transmit monetary policy shocks to exchange rates, while investment funds' unwinding of hedges contribute to dollar appreciations when credit risk rises. Our results highlight that exchange rates depend on the composition of trading activities in FX derivatives markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Sinem Hacioglu Hoke & Daniel A. Ostry & Hélène Rey & Adrien Rousset Planat & Vania Stavrakeva & Jenny Tang, 2026. "Topography of the FX Derivatives Market: A View from London," NBER Working Papers 34588, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34588
    Note: AP CF IFM
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34588.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F30 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - General
    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets

    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:nbr:nberwo:34588. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.