[...]... neither moral nor immoral, but rather amoral Currency speculation does not take place within a vacuum, but instead is a market and indeed a human response to changes in ordinary fundamental and technical dynamics For the most part, currency speculators follow the same economic and technical analytical signposts as corporations and investors On occasion, both investors and corporations can act as currency. .. book on top of a full-time job as a currency strategist I am also as ever indebted to my father and to the memory of my mother, who battled to get me to read at an early age, an effort that successfully unleashed an avalanche of reading, inquiry and travel What little or otherwise I have become is down to their dedication and love and a very simple rule — to fail is forgivable but to fail to try is not... another book on exchange rates? The frank answer is that I felt there was a gaping hole in that “rich” literature, a massive omission that was intolerable and had to be addressed Simply put, few if any of these works appeared to be aimed at the actual people who would have to put the theory into practice and actually execute the currency market transaction It was as if a bank had written a series of books... rose inexorably against the US dollar Did economic “fundamentals” play a part? Of course they did Japan’s huge trade and current account surpluses with the US meant that for the dollar–yen exchange rate to remain stable Japan had to export to the US the same amount of capital through its capital account deficit At times when this was not the case, the yen was bound to appreciate and so it transpired The... Chapter 2 (Currency Economics: A More Focused Framework) seeks to go beyond these theoretical models outlined in Chapter 1 to capture those elements of economics relevant to the currency market and tie them into a loose analytical framework capable of giving a more relevant and accurate picture of short- and medium-term currency market dynamics Whereas the classical economic approach has been to start... with market-based valuation techniques to produce a more accurate and user-friendly analytical tool for the currency market practitioners themselves In terms of a breakdown, the book is deliberately split into three specific sections with regard to the currency market and exchange rates: r Part I (Chapters 1–4) — Theory and Practice r Part II (Chapters 5 and 6) — Regimes and Crises r Part III (Chapters... experiment that started 30 years ago appears to have created a monster The last decade in particular has seen much talk of a need to bring exchange rates back under control, either through a tax on currency trading (the so-called “Tobin Tax” idea) or a move to re-peg exchange rates, perhaps even using gold as the monetary anchor From my perspective, while exchange rate volatility is frequently unwanted,... to use a more currency- focused form of economic analysis or as I term @Team-FLY 6 Currency Strategy it currency economics”, both for the purpose of trying to improve currency forecasting and recommendation accuracy Using these various disciplines, I would recommend that currency market practitioners adopt an integrated approach towards currency forecasting and strategy that is both rigorous and flexible... perfect and that past pricing holds no relevance in a market place where all participants are rational and profit-seeking, there have been a number of recent academic works looking at how “order flow” can in fact be a crucial determinant of future prices Thus Chapter 3 seeks to take this view a stage further and look at using order flow — that is the sum of client flows going through a bank — as a tool for forecasting. .. requires a different approach As with some investors, there are corporations ideologically fixated with the idea of not hedging Others focus on the “natural” approach to hedging through the matching of currency assets and liabilities There is an understandable desire on the part of some corporate executives to leave the issue of currency risk to the likes of currency dealers and speculators and to “just . Notes Harry Kat Advanced Modelling in Finance Using Excel and VBA Mary Jackson and Mike Staunton Operational Risk: Measurement and Modelling Jack King Advanced Credit Risk Analysis: Financial Approaches. Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd, 22 Worcester Road, Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada M9W 1L1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue. Dawn. Prior to his current position, Mr. Henderson was part of the Citibank FX Strategy team which has been top-ranked by leading publications, and Manager of FX Analysis – Asia for Standard & Poor’s