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Retail investors' trading behaviour in foreign exchange markets
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Based on a dataset of positioning data from one of the largest forex trading platforms in the world, we study the trading behaviour of retail investors on a daily frequency for 14 currency pairs. We examine, whether retail investors could benefit from positioning data. Using a quantile regression framework we find that a representative investor shows a combination of short term contrarian behaviour and long term trend following. Employing positioning data in a naive trading strategy, we observe strong signs of the disposition effect. Overall, investors approach to market timing paired with an asymmetry in realizing gains and losses leads to systematic underperformance based on a strategy mimicking the trading behaviour of investors average positioning.
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We develop a panel intensity framework for the analysis of complex trading activity datasets containing detailed information on individual trading actions in different securities for a set of investors. A feature of the model is the presence of a time-varying latent factor, which captures the influence of unobserved time effects and allows for correlation across individuals. We contribute to the literature on market microstructure and behavioral finance by providing new results on the disposition effect and on the manifestation of risk aversion on the high-frequency trading level. These novel insights are made possible by the joint characterization of not only the decision to close (exit) a position, usually considered in isolation in the literature, but also the decision to open (enter) a position, which together describe the trading process in its entirety. While the disposition effect is defined with respect to the willingness to realize profits/losses with respect to the performance of the position under consideration, we find that the performance of the total portfolio of positions is an additional factor influencing trading decisions that can reinforce or dampen the standard disposition effect. Moreover, the proposed methodology allows the investigation of the strength of these effects for different groups of investors ranging from small retail investors to professional and institutional investors.
Trading in the FX market reached an all-time high of $5.3 trillion per day in April 2013, a 35% increase relative to 2010. Non-dealer financial institutions, including smaller banks, institutional investors and hedge funds, have grown into the largest and most active counterparty segment. The once clear-cut divide between inter-dealer and customer trading is gone. Technological change has increased the connectivity of participants, bringing down search costs. A new form of "hot potato" trading has emerged where dealers no longer play an exclusive role.
This article explores behaviors of emerging players in the foreign exchange markets, retail investors in Japan. We find that they are momentum traders, implying that their actions could have a destabilizing effect in the markets. We also present the fact that the portfolio formation is mainly driven by past returns from spot rate changes, not interest rate differentials. Examining asymmetries in their behaviors shows that momentum tradings are relatively stronger particularly for sells after the global financial crisis occurred.
We study the information in order flows in the world's largest over-the-counter market, the foreign exchange (FX) market. The analysis draws on a data set covering a broad cross-section of currencies and different customer segments of FX end-users. The results suggest that order flows are highly informative about future exchange rates and provide significant economic value. We also find that different customer groups can share risk with each other effectively through the intermediation of a large dealer, and differ markedly in their predictive ability, trading styles, and risk exposure.
I measure household investment decisions undertaken in a setting that is free from investment taxes. The disposition effect is unequivocally present, but any seasonal impact of tax-loss selling is absent. There is evidence that the disposition effect correlates positively with inferior risk-adjusted investment performance. Although household preferences are unknown, losses cannot be explained by tax benefits.
In this paper we provide evidence that the trading activity of small retail investors carries significant information for the short term out-of-sample forecasting of foreign exchange rates. Our findings are based on a unique dataset of around 2000 retail investors from the OANDA FXTrade electronic trading platform. Our results are consistent with the view that in the foreign exchange market private information is highly dispersed, but can be extracted by observing customer order flow. Previous studies, however, focused on the information content of costumer order flow of dealers in the interbank market, whose clients are themselves large institutional and professional investors. Our study is the first that analyses a crowd of small retail investors and shows that even the trading activity of these investors contains, on aggregate, important non-public information, that can be exploited for short term exchange rate forecasting. Our findings lead us to conjecture that retail investors (on aggregate) are not pure noise traders but process dispersed information at least partially in a similar way as large institutional investors and hence place their orders accordingly.