Exchange Rate Returns Standardized by Realized Volatility Are (Nearly) Gaussian

The prescriptions of modern financial risk management hinge critically on the associated characterization of the distribution of future returns (cf., Diebold, Gunther and Tay, 1998, and Diebold, Hahn and Tay, 1999). Because volatility persistence renders high-frequency returns temporally dependent (e.g., Bollerslev, Chou and Kroner, 1992), it is the conditional return distribution, and not the unconditional distribution, that is of relevance for risk management. This is especially true in high-frequency situations, such as monitoring and managing the risk associated with the day-to-day operations of a trading desk, where volatility clustering is omnipresent. Exchange rate returns are well-known to be unconditionally symmetric but highly leptokurtic. Standardized daily or weekly returns from ARCH and related stochastic volatility models also appear symmetric but leptokurtic; that is, the distributions are not only unconditionally, but also conditionally leptokurtic, although less so than unconditionally.1 A sizable literature explicitly attempts to model the fat-tailed conditional distributions, including, for example, Bollerslev (1987), Engle and Gonzalez-Rivera (1991), and Hansen (1994).