Relationship between currency carry trade and DAX & DJIA

Abstract: Abstract:   The last decade currency carry trade has gained a lot of popularity because of their apparent profitability. It is a strategy that has been developed to exploit violations of the Uncovered Interest Rate Parity. In particular, an investor must take a short position in a low-yielding currency to fund a long position in a high-yielding currency. In this research, we tried to contribute in the previous literature for the currency carry trade and its characteristics by using a different approach. Most of the researches that have been conducted in this area concern the risk agents associated with this strategy. However, in our research we investigated the relationship between currency carry trade and two equity indexes, one from the European market (DAX) and one from the American (DJIA). In order to do that, we estimated the returns of the DAX and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) as well as the returns of a carry trade index created by the Deutsche Bank, the Deutsche Bank’s G10 Currency Future Harvest index. The returns were estimated for a time period of twenty years (1995-2014). More specific, we examined whether there is granger causality between the returns of carry trade and of DAX/DJIA, whether there is leverage effect on the returns of the same index and finally whether changes in the returns of one of those indexes can affect the subsequent volatility of the other two. For being able to do this examination, we used two different statistical models, the Vector Autoregression (VAR) and the EGARCH [1, 1] model.       The first empirical finding suggests that there is granger causal effect from the two equity markets to carry trade, however the carry trade granger cause only to DJIA index. The second finding indicates that there no leverage effect form the past returns to the future volatility for all the three indexes. Finally, the last finding suggests that the volatility process on the returns of one index cannot be determined by changes in the returns of the other two indexes. Keywords: Currency carry, uncovered interest rate parity, DAX, DJIA, G10 currency, granger causality, VAR, EGARCH[1,1]