IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gla/glaewp/2009_13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Exchange rate forecasters’ performance: evidence of skill?

Author

Listed:
  • Ronald MacDonald
  • Lukas Menkhoff
  • Rafael R. Rebitzky

Abstract

IThis paper sheds new light on a long-standing puzzle in the international finance literature, namely, that exchange rate expectations appear inaccurate and even irrational. We find for a comprehensive dataset that individual forecasters’ performance is skill-based. ‘Superior’ fore-casters show consistent ability as their forecasting success holds across currencies. They seem to possess knowledge on the role of fundamentals in explaining exchange rate behavior, as indicated by better interest rate forecasts. Superior forecasters are more experienced than the median forecaster and have fewer personnel responsibilities. Accordingly, foreign exchange markets may function in less puzzling and irrational ways than is often thought.

Suggested Citation

  • Ronald MacDonald & Lukas Menkhoff & Rafael R. Rebitzky, 2009. "Exchange rate forecasters’ performance: evidence of skill?," Working Papers 2009_13, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    • Handle: RePEc:gla:glaewp:2009_13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_112258_en.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blake, David & Beenstock, Michael & Brasse, Valerie, 1986. "The Performance of UK Exchange Rate Forecasters," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 96(384), pages 986-999, December.
    2. Bacchetta, Philippe & Mertens, Elmar & van Wincoop, Eric, 2009. "Predictability in financial markets: What do survey expectations tell us?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 406-426, April.
    3. Pesaran, M. Hashem & Weale, Martin, 2006. "Survey Expectations," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 14, pages 715-776, Elsevier.
    4. Elliott, Graham & Ito, Takatoshi, 1999. "Heterogeneous expectations and tests of efficiency in the yen/dollar forward exchange rate market," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 435-456, April.
    5. Paul De Grauwe & Marianna Grimaldi, 2014. "Exchange Rate Puzzles: A Tale of Switching Attractors," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Exchange Rates and Global Financial Policies, chapter 3, pages 71-117, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    6. Frankel, Jeffrey A & Froot, Kenneth A, 1987. "Using Survey Data to Test Standard Propositions Regarding Exchange Rate Expectations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 77(1), pages 133-153, March.
    7. Lucio Sarno & Giorgio Valente & Mark E. Wohar, 2004. "Monetary Fundamentals and Exchange Rate Dynamics under Different Nominal Regimes," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 42(2), pages 179-193, April.
    8. Rapach, David E. & Wohar, Mark E., 2002. "Testing the monetary model of exchange rate determination: new evidence from a century of data," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 359-385, December.
    9. Marsh, Ian W. & Power, David M., 1996. "A note on the performance of foreign exchange forecasters in a portfolio framework," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 605-613, April.
    10. Kilian, Lutz & Taylor, Mark P., 2003. "Why is it so difficult to beat the random walk forecast of exchange rates?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 85-107, May.
    11. Ronald MacDonald, 2000. "Expectations Formation and Risk in Three Financial Markets: Surveying What the Surveys Say," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(1), pages 69-100, February.
    12. Sarno,Lucio & Taylor,Mark P., 2003. "The Economics of Exchange Rates," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521485845, January.
    13. Richard M. Levich, 1979. "Analyzing the Accuracy of Foreign Exchange Advisory Services: Theory AndEvidence," NBER Working Papers 0336, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Judith Chevalier & Glenn Ellison, 1999. "Are Some Mutual Fund Managers Better Than Others? Cross‐Sectional Patterns in Behavior and Performance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(3), pages 875-899, June.
    15. Ito, Takatoshi, 1990. "Foreign Exchange Rate Expectations: Micro Survey Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(3), pages 434-449, June.
    16. Abhyankar, Abhay & Sarno, Lucio & Valente, Giorgio, 2005. "Exchange rates and fundamentals: evidence on the economic value of predictability," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 325-348, July.
    17. Cheung, Yin-Wong & Chinn, Menzie D. & Pascual, Antonio Garcia, 2005. "Empirical exchange rate models of the nineties: Are any fit to survive?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(7), pages 1150-1175, November.
    18. Philippe Bacchetta & Eric Van Wincoop, 2006. "Can Information Heterogeneity Explain the Exchange Rate Determination Puzzle?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(3), pages 552-576, June.
    19. Pasquale Della Corte & Lucio Sarno & Ilias Tsiakas, 2009. "An Economic Evaluation of Empirical Exchange Rate Models," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(9), pages 3491-3530, September.
    20. Meese, Richard A. & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1983. "Empirical exchange rate models of the seventies : Do they fit out of sample?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(1-2), pages 3-24, February.
    21. MacDonald, Ronald & Taylor, Mark P., 1994. "The monetary model of the exchange rate: long-run relationships, short-run dynamics and how to beat a random walk," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 276-290, June.
    22. Unknown, 1986. "Letters," Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 1(4), pages 1-9.
    23. Maurice Obstfeld & Kenneth Rogoff, 2001. "The Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomics: Is There a Common Cause?," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, Volume 15, pages 339-412, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    24. Kenneth S. Rogoff & Vania Stavrakeva, 2008. "The Continuing Puzzle of Short Horizon Exchange Rate Forecasting," NBER Working Papers 14071, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    25. Wakita, Shigeru, 1989. "Are survey forecasts trusted? : American trade account deficit and yen/dollar rate," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 339-344.
    26. Frankel, Jeffrey A. & Rose, Andrew K., 1995. "Empirical research on nominal exchange rates," Handbook of International Economics, in: G. M. Grossman & K. Rogoff (ed.), Handbook of International Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 33, pages 1689-1729, Elsevier.
    27. Mikhail, Michael B. & Walther, Beverly R. & Willis, Richard H., 2004. "Do security analysts exhibit persistent differences in stock picking ability?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 67-91, October.
    28. Lukas Menkhoff & Mark P. Taylor, 2007. "The Obstinate Passion of Foreign Exchange Professionals: Technical Analysis," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 45(4), pages 936-972, December.
    29. Dominguez, Kathryn M., 1986. "Are foreign exchange forecasts rational? : New evidence from survey data," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 277-281.
    30. Momtchil Pojarliev & Richard M. Levich, 2007. "Do Professional Currency Managers Beat the Benchmark?," NBER Working Papers 13714, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    31. Robert Kosowski & Allan Timmermann & Russ Wermers & Hal White, 2006. "Can Mutual Fund “Stars” Really Pick Stocks? New Evidence from a Bootstrap Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(6), pages 2551-2595, December.
    32. Michael B. Clement & Senyo Y. Tse, 2005. "Financial Analyst Characteristics and Herding Behavior in Forecasting," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(1), pages 307-341, February.
    33. Allen, Helen & Taylor, Mark P, 1990. "Charts, Noise and Fundamentals in the London Foreign Exchange Market," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 100(400), pages 49-59, Supplemen.
    34. Shinji Takagi, 1991. "Exchange Rate Expectations: A Survey of Survey Studies," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 38(1), pages 156-183, March.
    35. Michela Nardo, 2003. "The Quantification of Qualitative Survey Data: A Critical Assessment," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(5), pages 645-668, December.
    36. Goodman, Stephen H, 1979. "Foreign Exchange Rate Forecasting Techniques: Implications for Business and Policy," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 34(2), pages 415-427, May.
    37. Leitch, Gordon & Tanner, J Ernest, 1991. "Economic Forecast Evaluation: Profits versus the Conventional Error Measures," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(3), pages 580-590, June.
    38. Cheung, Yin-Wong & Wong, Clement Yuk-Pang, 2000. "A survey of market practitioners' views on exchange rate dynamics," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 401-419, August.
    39. Jeffrey A. Frankel & Kenneth A. Froot, 1985. "Using Survey Data to Test Some Standard Propositions Regarding Exchange Rate Expectations," NBER Working Papers 1672, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    40. Macdonald, Ronald & Marsh, Ian W., 1996. "Currency forecasters are heterogeneous: confirmation and consequences," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(5), pages 665-685, October.
    41. Loh, Roger K. & Mian, G. Mujtaba, 2006. "Do accurate earnings forecasts facilitate superior investment recommendations?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(2), pages 455-483, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brückbauer, Frank & Schröder, Michael, 2021. "Data resource profile: The ZEW FMS dataset," ZEW Discussion Papers 21-100, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    2. Oliver Gloede & Lukas Menkhoff, 2014. "Financial Professionals' Overconfidence: Is It Experience, Function, or Attitude?," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 20(2), pages 236-269, March.
    3. Fat Codruta Maria & Dezsi Eva, 2011. "Exchange-Rates Forecasting: Exponential Smoothing Techniques And Arima Models," Annals of Faculty of Economics, University of Oradea, Faculty of Economics, vol. 1(1), pages 499-508, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. MacDonald, Ronald & Menkhoff, Lukas & Rebitzky, Rafael R., 2009. "Exchange rate forecasters’ performance: evidence of skill?," SIRE Discussion Papers 2009-10, Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE).
    2. Menkhoff, Lukas & Rebitzky, Rafael R. & Schröder, Michael, 2009. "Heterogeneity in exchange rate expectations: Evidence on the chartist-fundamentalist approach," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 70(1-2), pages 241-252, May.
    3. Dick, Christian D. & Menkhoff, Lukas, 2013. "Exchange rate expectations of chartists and fundamentalists," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(7), pages 1362-1383.
    4. Ledenyov, Dimitri O. & Ledenyov, Viktor O., 2015. "Wave function method to forecast foreign currencies exchange rates at ultra high frequency electronic trading in foreign currencies exchange markets," MPRA Paper 67470, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Dick, Christian D. & MacDonald, Ronald & Menkhoff, Lukas, 2015. "Exchange rate forecasts and expected fundamentals," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 235-256.
    6. Menkhoff, Lukas & Rebitzky, Rafael R., 2008. "Investor sentiment in the US-dollar: Longer-term, non-linear orientation on PPP," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 455-467, June.
    7. Ron Jongen & Willem F.C. Verschoor & Christian C.P. Wolff, 2008. "Foreign Exchange Rate Expectations: Survey And Synthesis," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(1), pages 140-165, February.
    8. Juan Jose Echavarria & Mauricio Villamizar-Villegas, 2016. "Great expectations? evidence from Colombia’s exchange rate survey," Latin American Economic Review, Springer;Centro de Investigaciòn y Docencia Económica (CIDE), vol. 25(1), pages 1-27, December.
    9. Frederik Kunze, 2020. "Predicting exchange rates in Asia: New insights on the accuracy of survey forecasts," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(2), pages 313-333, March.
    10. Ronald MacDonald, 2000. "Expectations Formation and Risk in Three Financial Markets: Surveying What the Surveys Say," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(1), pages 69-100, February.
    11. Barbara Rossi, 2013. "Exchange Rate Predictability," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(4), pages 1063-1119, December.
    12. Lukas Menkhoff & Rafael Rebitzky & Michael Schroder, 2008. "Do dollar forecasters believe too much in PPP?," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(3), pages 261-270.
    13. Melvin, Michael & Prins, John & Shand, Duncan, 2013. "Forecasting Exchange Rates: an Investor Perspective," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 721-750, Elsevier.
    14. Kunze, Frederik, 2017. "Predicting exchange rates in Asia: New insights on the accuracy of survey forecasts," University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics 326, University of Goettingen, Department of Economics.
    15. Beckmann, Joscha & Czudaj, Robert, 2017. "Exchange rate expectations since the financial crisis: Performance evaluation and the role of monetary policy and safe haven," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 283-300.
    16. Jongen, Ron & Verschoor, Willem F.C. & Wolff, Christian C.P. & Zwinkels, Remco C.J., 2012. "Explaining dispersion in foreign exchange expectations: A heterogeneous agent approach," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 36(5), pages 719-735.
    17. Eun, Cheol S. & Sabherwal, Sanjiv, 2002. "Forecasting exchange rates: Do banks know better?," Global Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 195-215.
    18. Christian Dreger & Georg Stadtmann, 2008. "What drives heterogeneity in foreign exchange rate expectations: insights from a new survey," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 13(4), pages 360-367.
    19. Pasquale Della Corte & Lucio Sarno & Giulia Sestieri, 2012. "The Predictive Information Content of External Imbalances for Exchange Rate Returns: How Much Is It Worth?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 94(1), pages 100-115, February.
    20. Moosa, Imad & Burns, Kelly, 2014. "The unbeatable random walk in exchange rate forecasting: Reality or myth?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 69-81.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Foreign exchange market; individual exchange rate forecasts; interest rate forecasts; forecaster experience;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gla:glaewp:2009_13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Business School Research Team (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dpglauk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.