Forex & Other Markets (Part II)

By Ahmad Hassam

The lower the prices of oil, the lower the inflationary pressures are going to become but this is not always true. The higher the price of oil, the higher the inflation would be and the slower the economic growth is going to become. Take oil as an inflation input and a limiting factor on the overall economic growth. Rising oil prices tend to retard economic growth that in turn depreciates the domestic currency. When you see oil prices making major moves, watch for the currencies that have a strong relationship with oil to make major moves as well. Some currencies have a positive correlation with oil meaning that when oil prices go up, the value of the currency also goes up. Other currencies have a negative correlation with oil meaning that when oil prices go up, the value of the currency goes down. If you can, utilize those currency pairs that have one currency with a positive correlation and one currency with a negative correlation in the pairing, like the CAD/JPY. This will help you not only make profits in your forex trading but also offset the additional expenses in your budget that will be brought on by rising oil prices.

The global oil reserves are finite. With the rising energy demand in emerging economies like China, India and Brazil, the prices of oil are expected to rise and reach around $200 per barrel in the coming few years. We would like to factor changes in the prices of oil into our inflation and growth expectations and then draw conclusions about the course of US Dollar from them. Above all, oil is just one input among many.

Stocks: You must have invested in stocks sometimes back. Many people invest in stocks. Buy and hold is the best strategy that has been followed over the years by the stock investor. Almost everyone is familiar with stocks and the stock markets. You can take stocks as microeconomic securities rising and falling in response to individual corporate results and prospects. Stocks are units of ownership rights that get traded on the stock exchanges.

You can think of individual countries as companies and their currencies as stocks that get traded in the global financial markets. Currencies are essentially macroeconomic securities fluctuating in response to wider ranging economic and political developments. There is no intuitive reason that stock market should be related to the forex market. Virtually nowhere else does the forex market serve as the perfect hedge for your investments than in the stock market? If you are a longer term investor who enjoys the long range returns of the stock market but who doesnt enjoy watching your account value drop whenever the stock market cycles through a downturn, you can offset your losses in the Forex market.

There was a boom in the Tokyo Stock Exchange a decade back. Many investors wanted to take part in that boom. But in order to invest in Japanese stocks, they needed Japanese Yen (JPY). Heavy buying pressure on JPY made it appreciate. So sometimes a relationship develops between a stock market and a currency for the time being. However, long term correlation studies bear this out that there is no major relationship between stocks and currencies. Major USD currency pairs and the US equity markets over the last five years have almost zero correlation coefficients. However, the two markets occasionally intersect.

The US stock market may drop on an unexpected hike in the US interest rates while USD may rally on the surprise move. For example, when equity market volatility reaches extraordinary levels like when S&P 500 Index loses 2% in a single day, USD may experience more pressure than it otherwise would have. But there is no guarantee of that.

Bonds: When interest rates are on the rise, at some point, doing business becomes difficult, and when interest rates fall, eventually economic growth is energized. The bond market rules the world. Everything that anyone does in the financial markets anymore is built upon interest rate analysis. Globalization is here to stay. At the center of the globalization phenomenon is the entity known as the bond market. As a futures trader, you are likely to deal mostly, but not exclusively, with the U.S. Treasury bond futures. However, over the next 10 or 20 years, or perhaps sooner, the European bond market, and more than likely bond markets in Dubai and China, will play significant roles in the global economy.

That relationship between rising and falling interest rates makes the markets in interest rate futures, Eurodollars, and Treasuries (bills, notes, and bonds) important for all consumers, speculators, economists, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Both the bond market as well as the forex market reacts to interest rate changes. Bond or fixed income markets have a more intuitive relationship with the forex markets as both are heavily influenced by the interest rate expectations. However, the short term supply and demand fluctuations interrupt most attempts to establish a viable link between the two markets on a short term basis.

Just about every country in the world with a convertible currency has some kind of bond or bond futures contract that trades on an exchange somewhere around the world. Sometimes, the bond markets more accurately reflect the changes in interest rate expectations with the forex market doing the catch up. At other times, the forex markets react first and fastest to the shifts in the interest rate expectations.

Changes in the relative interest rates exert a major influence on forex markets. As a forex trader, you definitely need to keep an eye on the yields of the benchmark government bonds of the major currency countries to better monitor the expectations of the interest rate market. - 31869

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