During past months we made a set of articles analyzing the performance of equity factors and selected systematic strategies during coronavirus crisis. These articles were short-ranged with data only from the start of the year 2020, which is enough for the purpose of the quick blog posts, but very short-sighted to see the nature of these strategies. Therefore, we expanded the time range by 20 years. For a better understanding of hedge possibilities of these strategies, we have added a comparison to essential safe-haven assets, not only to equities.

A lot of backtests of systematic trading strategies omit transaction costs (in the form of spreads and fees). Simulation is then simpler, but resultant model portfolio and its performance can be misleading. In the case of currency factor investing, backtest without the costs simulation can pick currencies with wider spreads and higher volatilities. And in real trading, with real-world transaction costs, a strategy can, therefore, perform significantly worse than expected. A research paper written by Melvin, Pan, and Wikstrom offers an elegant optimization methodology to incorporate transaction costs into the backtesting process which allows strategies to retain their alpha …

Authors: Michael Melvin, Wenqiang Pan, Petra Wikstrom

Title: Retaining Alpha: The Effect of Trade Size and Rebalancing Frequency on FX Strategy Returns

The idea of buying an investment asset for a lower price than a fair-value is the cornerstone of value factor strategies. Various value strategies were popularized by famous investor Benjamin Graham (and his successors like Warren Buffett) and were firstly employed in the stock market. This idea of looking for investment opportunities that can be bought cheaply can also be applied in currency markets – Currency Value Factor strategy. There is, however, one catch – an investor must know the fair-value exchange rate for currencies. The most popular equilibrium exchange rate model used for this purpose is based on PPP (purchasing power parity). A new research paper written by Ca’ Zorzi, Cap, Mijakovic, and Rubaszek analyzes two additional models – Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate (BEER) and the Macroeconomic Balance (MB) approach to assess which model has the best forecasting power.

Authors: Ca’ Zorzi, Cap, Mijakovic, Rubaszek

Title: The Predictive Power of Equilibrium Exchange Rate Models

The United States has a special place in a global financial system. The U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and U.S. Treasuries are used as primary safe assets. Therefore, it is no surprise that the U.S. has some benefits from this arrangement. Academic research paper written by Krishnamurthy & Lustig shows that the U.S. derives a “convenience yield” from a demand of foreign investors. They consequently incur lower returns on their holdings of dollar-denominated safe assets. The FED’s conventional and unconventional monetary policy actions directly impact the supply of dollar-denominated safe assets. These decisions also affect the size of convenience yield, which causes moves in global financial markets…

Authors: Krishnamurthy, Lustig

Title: Mind the Gap in Sovereign Debt Markets: The U.S. Treasury basis and the Dollar Risk Factor

A new research paper related to multiple currency strategies:

#5 – FX Carry Trade
#8 – Currency Momentum Factor
#9 – Currency Value Factor – PPP Strategy

Authors: Baku, Fortes, Herve, Lezmi, Malongo, Roncalli, Xu

Title: Factor Investing in Currency Markets: Does it Make Sense?

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3415700

Abstract:

The concept of factor investing emerged at the end of the 2000s and has completely changed the landscape of equity investing. Today, institutional investors structure their strategic asset allocation around five risk factors: size, value, low beta, momentum and quality. This approach has been extended to multi-asset portfolios and is known as the alternative risk premia model. This framework recognizes that the construction of diversified portfolios cannot only be reduced to the allocation policy between asset classes, such as stocks and bonds. Indeed, diversification is multifaceted and must also consider alternative risk factors. More recently, factor investing has gained popularity in the fixed income universe, even though the use of risk factors is an old topic for modeling the yield curve and pricing interest rate contingent claims. Factor investing is now implemented for managing portfolios of corporate bonds or emerging bonds.

In this paper, we focus on currency markets. The dynamics of foreign exchange rates are generally explained by several theoretical economic models that are commonly presented as competing approaches. In our opinion, they are more complementary and they can be the backbone of a Fama-French-Carhart risk factor model for currencies. In particular, we show that these risk factors
may explain a significant part of time-series and cross-section returns in foreign exchange markets. Therefore, this result helps us to better understand the management of forex portfolios. To illustrate this point, we provide some applications concerning basket hedging, overlay management and the construction of alpha strategies.

Notable quotations from the academic research paper:

"In this paper, we propose analyzing foreign exchange rates using three main risk factors: carry, value and momentum. The choice of these market risk factors is driven by the economic models of foreign exchange rates. For instance, the carry risk factor is based on the uncovered interest rate parity, the value risk factor is derived from equilibrium models of the real exchange rate, and the momentum risk factor benefits from the importance of technical analysis, trading behavior and overreaction/underreaction patterns. Moreover, analyzing an asset using these three dimensions helps to better characterize the financial patterns that impact an asset: its income, its price and its trend dynamics. Indeed, carry is associated with the yield of the asset, value measures the fair price or the fundamental risk and momentum summarizes the recent price movements.

By using carry, value and momentum risk factors, we are equipped to study the cross-section and time-series of currency returns. In the case of stocks and bonds, academics present their results at the portfolio level because of the large universe of these asset classes. Since the number of currencies is limited, we can show the results at the security level.

For each currency, we can then estimate the sensitivity with respect to each risk factor, the importance of common risk factors, when specific risk does matter, etc. We can also connect statistical figures with monetary policies and regimes, illustrating the high interconnectedness of market risk factors and economic risk factors. The primary goal of building an APT model for currencies is to have a framework for analyzing and comparing the behavior of currency returns. This is the main objective of this paper, and a more appropriate title would have been "Factor Analysis of Currency Returns". By choosing the title "Factor Investing in Currency Markets", we emphasize that our risk factor framework can also help to manage currency portfolios as security analysis always comes before investment decisions.

This paper is organized as follows. Section Two is dedicated to the economics of foreign exchange rates. We first introduce the concept of real exchange rate, which is central for understanding the different theories of exchange rate determination. Then, we focus on interest rate and purchasing power parities. Studying monetary models and identifying the statistical properties of currency returns also helps to define the market risk factors, which are presented in Section Three. These risk factors are built using the same approach in terms of portfolio composition and rebalancing. Section Four presents the cross-section and time-series analysis of each currency. We can then estimate a time-varying APT-based model in order to understand the dynamics of currency markets. The results of this dynamic model can be used to manage a currency portfolio. This is why Section Five considers hedging and
overlay management."

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A new academic paper related to:

#8 – Currency Momentum Factor

Authors: Zaremba, Kambouris

Title: The Sources of Momentum in International Government Bond Returns

Link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3332942

Abstract:

This study aims to offer a new explanation for the momentum effect in international government bonds. Using cross-sectional and time-series tests, we examine a sample of bonds from 22 countries for the years 1980 through 2018. We document significant momentum profits that are not attributable to bond-specific risk factors, such as volatility or credit risk. The global bond momentum is driven by the returns on underlying foreign exchange rates. Controlling for currency movements fully explains the abnormal returns on momentum strategies in international government bonds. The results are robust to many considerations including alternative sorting periods, portfolio construction methods, as well as subperiod and subsample analysis.

Notable quotations from the academic research paper:

"The various types of momentum effects have also been documented in government bonds, implying that the fixed-income winners outperform fixed-income losers. Although the finance literature extensively discusses the sources of momentum in an equity universe, the specific explanations for momentum in government bonds are rather scarce.

This paper aims to contribute in two ways. First, we provide new evidence on the momentum effect in international government bond markets. Using cross-sectional and time-series tests, we investigate a sample of government bonds from 22 countries for the years 1980 through 2018.

Second, and more importantly, we offer and test two new explanations of momentum. Our first hypothesis builds on Conrad and Kaul (1998): we conjecture that the momentum in bonds may simply capture the cross-sectional variation in long-run returns. In other words, the top performing assets continue to deliver higher returns because they exhibit excessive risk exposure. In particular, we assume that the winner (loser) bonds may display high (low) exposure to duration and credit risks, which drive the excessive long-run returns. The second hypothesis is that the momentum in bonds might be driven by the returns on underlying currencies.

The primary findings of this study can be summarized as follows. We document a strong and robust momentum effect in government bonds. An equal-weighted portfolio of past winners tends to outperform past losers by 0.24–0.35% per month. The effect is not fully attributable to the risk factors in government bonds, which explain 38–55% of the abnormal profits. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is entirely explained by the momentum in underlying foreign exchange rates, which is consistent with our second hypothesis. Once we control for the currency returns in cross-section or time-series tests, the momentum alphas disappear. The results are robust to many considerations, including alternative sorting periods and portfolio implementation methods, as well as subperiod and subsample analyses."

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