Sunday, March 15, 2009

Correlation in the FOREX market

What is that
Variability in the market of foreign currency options (right to buy currency at a specified price within a specified period) measures the extent and magnitude of changes in the price of the currency. The implicit volatility of options on the market measure the expected fluctuation in currency prices over a given period of time, based on historical fluctuations. Variability is usually calculated using the historical standard deviation of daily price changes.

Variability is one of the key parameters in the formation of prices of options. The higher variability in the general case makes premiums more expensive options. Professional options traders would usually buy options when volatility low and selling options when volatility is high. Traders who only trade on volatility, and then will need to hedge their options, buying or selling currency in the spot market (the transaction at current rates).

How can it be used?
• The low variability of stock options - looking for potential breakthroughs;
• The high variability of stock options - look for opportunities to trade in that range.

Variability of stock options - it's quite useful tools that can be used to determine the time of the movements in the forex market. Typically, when the currency traded in a range, most likely, variability of the corresponding option is reduced. This is because, by definition, trading in a range of means lack of movement. When the variability of the option has a clear downward movement, it is usually a good sign for the significant upward movement. It is very important for breakthroughs on trade and trade in the range. Traders who usually sell the top of the range and buy at its base, can use this tool to predict when their strategy stops working. Traders selling on breakthroughs can monitor the variability of stock options to make sure that they do not buy or sell, with no false break.

Below are the schedules EURUSD and GBPUSD, which showcased examples of how the sharp decline in the volatility of options predicted large movements in the currency pair. These examples are shown in ascending motion, but the tool works exactly the same for downward movement.

In April of 2003. 3-month call options on EURUSD volatility has gone down, while the spot price of the instrument was in a fairly narrow trading range. If a trader bought EURUSD, based on this movement in the volatility of option, he would more than happily joined in the subsequent movement of 700 points, which happened in the next 3 months.

A similar scenario can be seen for the pair GBPUSD. In April of 2003. variability of stock options has plummeted from 8% to 7.3%, while the GBPUSD traded in that range. In the next month GBPUSD made a rally of 550 points from the level of 1.5550 to 1.6100.

This strategy works reasonably well, but traders must comply with some caution because of variability may be a long down trend, as they did in the period from June to October 2002. Therefore, sometimes declining volatility can be misleading. Therefore, traders should look for sudden movement variability, rather than gradual. Traders will need to keep a journal, tracking historical data on the variability. One-and three-month variability is the most commonly used time period for this purpose.



Forex Magazine
based on www.screamingquote.com

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