Currency Order Flow and Macroeconomic Information
Pasquale Della Corte, Dagfinn Rime, Lucio Sarno, Ilias Tsiakas*
Last modified: %2012-%08-%02
Abstract
We investigate the predictive information content of order ow for exchange rate returns, using a unique data set on daily end-user transactions for nine exchange rates across four customer types from 2001 to 2011. We
nd that a multi-currency trading strategy based solely on customer order flow strongly outperforms the popular carry trade strategy. More importantly, the excess portfolio returns generated from conditioning on customer order ow can be largely replicated using a combination of strategies based on publicly available information. This is consistent with the notion that order flow aggregates disperse public information about economic fundamentals that are relevant to exchange rates.