We examine contagion and flight-to-quality phenomena implied by carry strategies. More specifically, we analyze correlation dynamics between returns on a global equity index and returns on an investment strategy with a long position in high-yield and a short position in low-yield markets....

We advocate the use of absolute moment ratio statistics in conjunctionwith standard variance ratio statistics in order to disentangle lineardependence, non-linear dependence, and leptokurtosis in financial timeseries. Both statistics are computed for multiple return horizonssimultaneously, and...

We sort currencies by countries' consumption growth over the past four quarters. Currency portfolios of countries experiencing consumption booms have higher Sharpe ratios than those of countries going through a consumption-based recession. A carry strategy that goes short in countries that are...

Past trends in fundamentals linked to economic activity and inflation predict currency returns. We find that a trading strategy that goes long currencies with strong economic momentum and short currencies with weak economic momentum exhibits an annualized Sharpe ratio of 0.70 and yields a...

Recent studies have shown that the Sharpe ratio and alpha for the momentum strategy can be increased, by scaling the momentum strategy, by the inverse of its historical volatility. However, we find that the higher Sharpe ratio and the alphas of the volatility scaled momentum strategy, in...

High momentum returns cannot be explained by risk factors, but they are negatively skewed and subject to occasional severe crashes. I explore the timing of momentum crashes and show that momentum strategies tend to crash in 1-3 months after the local stock market plunge. Next, I propose a simple...

We demonstrate the estimation biases that arise when stock returns from 12 month prior and 2 month prior are included within intermediate and recent past momentum profits. These biases lead to an overestimation of intermediate past momentum but an underestimation of recent past momentum in the...

There are no established benchmarks for evaluating currency investment manager performance. Some analysts have suggested that known investing styles like momentum, purchasing power parity, and carry serve as benchmarks. Challenges for this approach include: there is no market portfolio; there...

Many recent papers have investigated the role played by volatility in determining the cross-section of currency returns. This paper employs two time-varying factor models: a threshold model and a Markov-switching model to price the excess returns from the currency carry trade. We show that the...