Hedge funds (and their clients) investing in gold should be aware of the differences among competing gold investment products. Gold appeals to different investors for different reasons, and different gold investment products can be more or less responsive to the investor's motivations. Hedge...

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) have steadily increased their importance in the global financial system in the last decade and especially during the financial crisis period. They currently have almost $6 trillion assets under management, which is more than the assets of Private Equity and Hedge...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the main features of active currency management programs, highlighting the mandates and the types of trading strategies that are often used. The traditional benchmark used to measure skill or alpha in currency investing is that the expected excess rate of...

Studying all possible pairs of eleven major currencies and eleven portfolios in 1976-2008 we show that, when there is no leverage, carry trade is significantly profitable for most currency pairs and portfolios. Positive returns do not diminish in time providing a strong case against the...

Based on the theory of static replication of variance swaps we assess the sign and magnitude of variance risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. We find significantly negative risk premiums when realized variance is computed from intraday data with low frequency. As a likely consequence of...

This article presents an overview of widely practiced short-term multi-currency investment strategies such as carry trade, momentum and term spread strategies. We provide evidence on their downside risk properties and illustrate their performance over historical episodes of financial market...

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...

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the diversification role of currency momentum for carry trade crashes during the turbulent periods surrounding the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The motivation is to use an important tendency of...

In this paper, we report evidence that mean currency returns are positive for both a domestic investor in a foreign currency and a foreign investor in a domestic currency. A shared currency gain creates a positive volatility factor for both. Volatility dominates other return determinants that...

Modelling and forecasting of asset volatility and covariance is of prime importance in the construction of portfolios. In this paper, we present a generalised multi-factor model that incorporates heteroskedasticity and dependence in the idiosyncratic error terms. We apply this model to...