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Corporate treasurers manage the currency risk of their organization by hedging through futures contracts. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of hedging by US currency futures contracts by taking into account the efficiency of the currency market.

The static models for calculating hedge ratio are as popular as dynamic models. But the main disadvantage with the static models is that they do not consider important properties of time series like autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity of the residuals and also ignore the cointegration of the market variables which indicate short-run market disequilibrium. The present study, therefore, measures the hedging effectiveness in the US currency futures market using two dynamic models – constant conditional correlation multivariate generalized ARCH (CCC-MGARCH) and dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH (DCC-MGARCH).

The study finds that both the dynamic models used in the study provide similar results. The relative comparison of CCC-MGARCH and DCC-MGARCH models shows that CCC-MGARCH provides better hedging effectiveness result, and thus, should be preferred over the other model.

The findings of the study are important for the company treasurers since the new updated Indian accounting standards (Ind-AS), applicable from the financial year 2016–2017, make it mandatory for the companies to evaluate the effectiveness of hedges. These standards do not specify a quantitative method of evaluation but provide the flexibility to the companies in choosing an appropriate method which justifies their risk management objective. These results are also useful for the policy makers as they can specify and list the appropriate methods for evaluating the hedge effectiveness in the currency market.

Majorly, the studies on Indian financial market limit themselves to either examining the efficiency of that market or to evaluate the effectiveness of the hedges undertaken. Moreover, most of such works focus on the stock market or the commodity market in India. This is one of the first studies which bring together the concepts of efficiency of the market and effectiveness of the hedges in the Indian currency futures market.

Recent research indicates that the random walk hypothesis (RWH) approximately describes the behavior of major dollar exchange rates during the post‐1973 float. The present analysis seeks to examine the profitability of currency futures trading rules that assume that spot exchange rates can be adequately modeled as a driftless random walk.

Two random walk currency futures trading rules are simulated over all available data from the period 1984‐2003. In both cases, the investor buys currencies selling at a discount and sells those selling at a premium, as the RWH implies. The two rules differ only in the way they allocate the hypothetical investor's resources among long and short foreign currency positions.

Results show that an investor who used these trading strategies over the past decade would have enjoyed large cumulative gains, although periods of profit were interrupted by periods of substantial loss.

The findings encourage the hope that profitable random‐walk‐based strategies for currency futures trading can be devised. The simulation results have important implications for those willing to hedge, borrowers, and speculators.

This paper provides evidence that purchasing futures contracts on currencies priced at a discount and selling futures contracts priced at a premium has generally been a profitable trading strategy during the last two decades of floating exchange rates.

Exposure risk managers can hedge exchange rate risk with either currency futures or currency options. It is generally suggested that hedgers should choose a hedge instrument that matches the risk profile of the underlying currency position as closely as possible. This advice, however, ignores the possibility that the hedging effectiveness may differ for the alternate risk management tools. This study compares the effectiveness of currency futures and currency options as hedging instruments for covered and uncovered currency positions. Based on Ederington's portfolio theory of hedging, the results show that currency futures provide the more effective covered hedge, while currency options (used to construct a synthetic futures contract) are more effective for an uncovered hedge. Hence, exposure risk managers do not have to sacrifice hedging effectiveness to obtain the desired risk profile. Corporations engaged in international business transactions are commonly exposed to exchange rate risk. Since management is concerned with currency exposure, it can hedge the anticipated exchange rate risk either with futures or options. The choice of the appropriate hedging tool is generally influenced by the type of currency exposure (transaction, translation, or economic risk), the size of the firm, the industry effect, the risk preference of the manager or the firm and his/her familiarity with the available financial instruments and techniques. It is also suggested that a hedger should choose a hedge instrument that matches the risk profile of the underlying currency position as closely as possible. Hence, futures contracts are more suitable for covered hedges, while option contracts are best used for uncovered hedges. Hedging effectiveness of these two hedge instruments must be considered as well in order to evaluate the cost of obtaining the desired risk profile. Some empirical research has shown that the futures contract provides both an appropriate risk profile and a more effective hedge than an options contract for covered positions. If these findings also hold for uncovered currency positions, then the hedging decision involves a trade‐off between the desired risk profile and hedging effectiveness. That is, a hedger would have to decide whether the extra risk protection afforded by the attractive risk profile of options is worth the loss in hedging performance. This study compares the hedging effectiveness of currency futures and currency options for both covered and uncovered positions. Ederington's risk‐minimizing approach is applied to estimate the hedging effectiveness and the least risk hedge ratios which, in turn, are used to assess the trade‐off between risk profile and hedging performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporaneous and causal relationship between returns (volatility) and trading volume in the Indian currency futures market for selected currency pairs; USD-INR, EUR-INR, GBP-INR and JPY-INR, from August 2008 to December 2014.

The data for all the currency futures series has been taken from National Stock Exchange of India Limited which represents the daily settlement prices along with trading volume. The contemporaneous returns-volume relation is tested using the generalized method of moments, and Granger-causality framework impulse response function is used to test the predictive ability of returns (volatility) and volume for each other.

The author reports a positive contemporaneous relationship between futures returns and trading volume which persists even after controlling for heteroskedasticity providing support to mixture of distribution hypothesis. The results show a unidirectional Granger causality from futures returns to volume. However, there is a significant bidirectional Granger causality between returns volatility and volume lending support to sequential arrival of information hypothesis. Next, the results for cross-currencies show significant influence of US dollar on the volume and returns of all other currencies. Overall, the author suggests that the short- to medium-term movements in the currency markets are dominated by market microstructure and not by fundamentals.

The findings of this paper are very important for the participants in the market and regulators. The participants in the market require alternatives to diversify their risk. The significant relationship between futures returns (volatility) and trading volume implies that the current trading volume help predict the futures prices and should lead to creation of more reliable hedging strategies for investment purposes. Further, it may interest the regulators who need to decide upon the appropriateness of their policies in the currency futures market. Based on returns-volume relation, they need to set forth market restrictions such as daily price movement and position limits.

To the best of the knowledge, no study has yet investigated the forecast ability of trading volume to price changes and their volatility in the Indian currency futures market. Given that currency futures market is one of the largest markets in the world, and Indian rupee has seen wide fluctuations in the recent years, it seems exciting to explore the price-volume relationship in the Indian currency futures market.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the price discovery and volatility spillovers in spot and futures prices of four currencies (namely, USD/INR, EURO/INR, GBP/INR and JPY/INR) and between futures prices of both stock exchanges namely, Multi-Commodity Stock Exchange (MCX-SX) and National Stock Exchange (NSE) in India.

The study applies cointegration test of Johansen’s along with VECM to investigate the price discovery. GARCH-BEKK model is used to examine the volatility spillover between spot and futures and between futures prices. The other two models namely, constant conditional correlation and dynamic conditional correlation are used to demonstrate the constant and time-varying correlations. In order to confirm the volatility spillover results, the study also applies test of directional spillovers suggested by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012).

The results of the study show that there is long-term equilibrium relationship between spot and futures and between futures markets. Between futures and spot prices, futures price appears to lead the spot price in the short-run. Volatility spillover results indicate that the movement of volatility spillover takes place from futures to spot in the short-run while spot to futures found in the long-run. However, the results of between futures markets exhibit the dominance of MCX-SX over NSE in terms of volatility spillovers. By and large, the findings of the study indicate the important role of futures market in price discovery as well as volatility spillovers in India’s currency market.

The results highlight the role of futures market in the information transmission process as it appears to assimilate new information quicker than spot market. Hence, policymakers in emerging markets such as India should focus on the development of necessary institutional and fiscal architecture, as well as regulatory reforms, so that the currency market trading platforms can achieve greater liquidity and efficiency.

Due to recent development of currency futures market, there is dearth of literature on this subject. With the apparent importance of currency market in recent time, this study attempts to study the efficient behavior of currency market by way of examining the price discovery and volatility spillovers between spot and futures and between futures prices of four currencies traded on two platforms. The study has strong implications for India’s stock market especially at the time when its currency is under great strain owing to the adverse impact of global financial crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to study the lead-lag relationship between the futures and spot foreign exchange (FX) market in India to understand the price discovery mechanism and the relationship between these two markets.

The estimation of lead-lag relationship is realized in three steps. First unit root and stationarity tests (Augmented Dickey-Fuller, Phillips-Perron, and Kwiatkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-Shin) are applied to check the stationarity of the data. Second, cointegration tests (Engle and Granger’s residual based approach and Johansen’s cointegration test) are applied to determine long run relationship between the markets. Third, error correction estimation is carried out by applying Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) to determine the leading market.

The study finds that there is a long run relationship between the futures and spot market where the futures market has emerged as the leading market for the four currencies studied in the paper.

Majorly, the studies on Indian FX market limit themselves to identifying the efficiency of the market and the studies which talk about the lead-lag relationship focus on the Indian stock market. This paper enhances the existing literature on Indian FX market by exploring the less explored subject of the lead-lag relationship between futures and spot FX market in India.

This paper tries to empirically investigate whether the information contained in trading volume, volume volatility of Won/Dollar currency futures may be statistically useful in forecasting currency spot return. This paper uses both the jump-diffusion GARCH model and the bivariate GARCH type BEKK model to estimate the trading volume volatility of currency futures and the volatility of currency spot, sampled daily during 1/4/2000~12/30/2009 period. According to the findings of this study, previous information contained in both trading volume and the volume volatility of Won/Dollar currency futures might be useful in explaining the future return of the currency spot.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the effectiveness of the hedging with futures currency contracts. Measuring the effectiveness of hedging has become mandatory for Indian companies as the new Indian accounting standards, Ind-AS, specify that the effectiveness of hedges taken by the companies should be evaluated using quantitative methods but leaves it to the company to choose a method of evaluation.

The paper compares three models for evaluating the effectiveness of hedge – ordinary least square (OLS), vector error correction model (VECM) and dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH (DCC-MGARCH) model. The OLS and VECM are the static models, whereas DCC-MGARCH is a dynamic model.

The overall results of the study show that dynamic model (DCC-MGARCH) is a better model for calculating the hedge effectiveness as it outperforms OLS and VECM models.

The new Indian accounting standards (Ind-AS) mandates the calculation of hedge effectiveness. The results of this study are useful for the treasurers in identifying appropriate method for evaluation of hedge effectiveness. Similarly, policymakers and auditors are benefitted as the study provides clarity on different methods of evaluation of hedging effectiveness.

Many previous studies have evaluated the efficiency of the Indian currency futures market, but with rising importance of hedging in the Indian companies, Reserve Bank of India’s initiatives and encouragement for the use of futures for hedging the currency risk and now the mandatory accounting requirement for measuring hedging effectiveness, it has become more relevant to evaluate the effectiveness of hedge. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is one of the first few papers which evaluate the effectiveness of the currency future hedging.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which multilateral banks (MBs) use currency derivatives (CDs) to hedge and speculate in managing currency risk. It aims to provide an empirical assessment of CDs products used by MBs as a group not studied before.

Quantitative hypothesis regarding the usage of CDs to minimize adverse impact of currency risk was tested using z test about population proportion.

The results show that MBs are using CDs in the following order of importance: currency swaps, currency forwards, currency options and currency futures primarily to hedge currency risk.

The results of the study can be generalized only for MBs, given their peculiar characteristics as wholesale banks, which are owned mainly by governments and are generally not listed in the stock exchanges.

The study is of value to those interested in the multilateral banking industry. The authors acknowledge that it is the first study providing empirical evidence on CDs’ usage by MBs as a group. The results are particularly useful to managers of MBs in terms of helping them to make choices in usage of CDs. The paper has also policy implications in terms of justifying the current self-regulatory status, shareholder monitoring and governance of MBs, as they do not speculate with CDs.

The purpose of the paper is to determine the future role of virtual currencies. This paper indicates their pros and cons as alternatives to “real” money and explains their appearance as the reflection of the present trends. It also presents the possible scenarios of their development.

The paper is based on the former foresight research results and literature review. It highlights the main trends in contemporary economy and their impact on financial services. The Bitcoin case is the starting point for the virtual currencies’ market analysis and construction of possible market changes scenarios.

Virtual currency schemes are the reflection of present trends. They are just ahead of our times but may become a common means of payment, changing the way of providing financial services, eliminating intermediaries and marginalizing the role of financial institutions.

The multiplicity of virtual currencies and ceaseless introduction of innovations impede the presentation of the complete market picture. The lack of reliable statistical data makes the estimation of the market growth difficult.

This paper indicates influence of technology development, virtualization and networking on payment systems’ functioning.

This paper shows the impact of environmental changes on consumers’ acceptance of virtual currencies.

The virtual currency as a payment system is quite new and still a marginalized phenomenon. Nevertheless, the pace of virtual currency market growth after its recent introduction and appearance of Bitcoin successors seems to be the signs of future changes in financial service sector.