Chartists, Fundamentalists, and Dispersion in the Foreign Exchange Market

This paper examines the dispersion of beliefs of market participants in the foreign exchange market and their relative role in forming exchange rate expectations. We find distinct variations in the level of dispersion and document that dispersion arises because of a combined effect of market participants holding private information and participants attaching different weights to fundamental, technical, and carry trade analyses. We also document evidence that chartist rules are predominantly used in the shorter spectrum of the forecast horizon and fundamentalist rules are predominantly used in the longer spectrum, and that the importance attached to these rules is adapted through time