It has been noted that emerging markets have different market properties to those of the developed markets. Here, it is important to sell these out and then in turn relate them to the considerations of passive and active currency risk management. First off, let us look at the major differences that appear present in emerging markets:
Liquidity risk — Emerging market currencies are less liquid than their developed counterparts. For instance, every day some USD300 billion goes through EUR–USD. This compares with around USD10 billion daily in the South African rand. Needless to say, this lower liquidity affects pricing and price action.
Convertibility risk — Even less than liquidity risk, convertibility risk is not a consideration for developed currency markets as all major currencies are freely floating and fully convertible. A number of emerging market currencies however are still not convertible on the capital account, and indeed a few are still not fully convertible on the current account.
Exchange controls — In line with this, several emerging market currencies still have varying degrees of exchange rate controls, which also distort exchange rate pricing and economic activity. Exchange controls create “black market” activity and paradoxically can lead to capital flight.
Emerging markets have structurally high levels of inflation — Stronger growth levels and economic inefficiencies are important reasons behind structurally high levels of inflation relative to developed markets. This in turn means that policy interest rates are in most cases substantially higher in emerging markets than in developed markets, resulting in high forward premiums.
Capital inflows however can depress market interest rates — The size of global capital flows relative to the size of local capital markets in most emerging markets can mean that the latter are swamped by a relatively small portfolio shift in assets either into the market or out of it. As a result, interest rate volatility is a lot higher.
Forward rate bias is lower in emerging markets — While forward exchange rates are poor predictors of future spot exchange rates in the developed markets, this is less so in many emerging markets. The exhaustive 2000 study by Bansal and Dahlquist tested the presence of forward rate bias and found emerging market currencies show significantly less correlation between current interest rate differentials and subsequent spot returns than those in the developed markets. That said, emerging market currencies tend to appreciate on a real basis and then collapse to adjust for the trade balance deterioration caused by that real exchange rate appreciation.
Implied emerging market volatility below developed market volatility is a buy signal —
Historically, lower levels of implied volatility in emerging market currencies than the corresponding developed market currencies has proven a good buy signal for the former. Intuitively, emerging market volatility should be higher, though there are periods when the sheer weight of capital inflows forces it artificially lower. Note that emerging market implied volatility is skewed in that it tends to fall only when the emerging market currency is strengthening, but always rises when the currency weakens.
Implied emerging market volatility is a very poor predictor of future exchange rates —
Looking at previous emerging market crises, the options market has usually got it “wrong” in the sense that such crises have never been priced in ahead of time by the options market. Thus, we can say that the options market is a poor predictor of future exchange rate levels in the emerging markets, though measured against historic volatility levels it may well be a much better indicator of relative value.
What we find in the emerging markets is that shifts in global capital flows have major domestic interest rate implications. For instance, high inflation and therefore interest rate differentials should, according to classical economic theory, suggest a depreciation of the local currency in proportion to that interest rate differential or forward premium. However, this may not occur due to heavy capital inflows, which swamp the domestic market’s ability to cope with these without economic distortion. As a result of this, the currency may experience significant nominal and real appreciation, in seeming violation of the international Fisher effect and covered interest rate parity. Real currency appreciation however leads to a real economic shock, and more specifically real trade and current account balance deterioration. Eventually, this has to be reversed and not too surprisingly through real currency depreciation. The longer and more powerful the real appreciation, the potentially more violent the subsequent depreciation. Emerging market currencies trade in these types of cycles, in line with the “speculative cycle” that we looked at earlier in the blog. As a result, we can tell from this that the forward rate bias is extreme for emerging market currencies on both sides of the forward. In line with this, some caution is needed in using the differential forward strategy in the emerging markets. Emerging market interest rate differentials would mean theoretically that an investor never hedged emerging market currency risk using the differential forward strategy, yet this is clearly not the appropriate strategy in some cases.
For similar reasons, the carry trade has provided significant alpha for active currency managers, both in the basic and in the optimized version. However, the distortion to interest and exchange rates that capital inflows provide in emerging markets means that a significantly higher degree of both care and discretion is needed in picking higher carry currencies to either invest in or hedge depending upon the reading of the risk appetite indicator.