Sohnke Bartram (Warwick Business School)

“Currency Anomalies”

Short bio: Söhnke M. Bartram is a Professor in the Department of Finance at Warwick Business School. He is also a Research Fellow in the Financial Economics programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Charter Member of Risk Who’s Who, and a member of an international think tank for policy advice to the German government. His immediate research activities center around issues in international finance and financial markets. Dr. Bartram’s work has been presented at conferences organized by the NBER, CEPR, the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and the American Economic Association, published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Management Science, and included in testimony before the U.S. Congress House Financial Services Committee.

Abstract: This paper is the first to study the cross-section of currency anomalies to explore alternative explanations for their existence. Using real-time data, currency anomalies are profitable during in-sample and out-of-sample periods, both before and after transaction costs, but trading profits decrease substantially after the publication of the underlying academic research. The decline is greater for anomalies with larger in-sample profits and lower arbitrage costs, and signal ranks and performance decay quickly, suggesting that currency anomalies reflect mispricing rather than compensation for risk or statistical bias. Mispricing is systematically related to mistakes and changes in analysts’ currency forecasts. In particular, analysts expect anomaly payoffs that are too low compared with actual anomaly profits. However, analysts update their forecasts to incorporate lagged anomaly information. These results are consistent with a behavioral explanation for currency anomalies.