This study shows that order flow in a foreign exchange market only has permanent price impact if it comes from certain regions. These regions are as predicted by the local information hypothesis centers of political and financial decision making. It is revealing that orders from other regions...

A contingent claims valuation model which allows to highlight the implications of program trading in spot markets for the pricing of European-style foreign currency options and for the volatility strike structure implicit in these contracts is devoloped. The curvature of the volatility strike...