ARTÍCULO
TITULO

Momentum Strategies in FX Markets

Kesley Leandro da Silva    
Marcelo Fernandes    

Resumen

We use weekly data to investigate the profitability of momentum strategies in the currency market based on two different extract methods of nonlinear trends. We compare their performance with the traditional moving average rules broadly used by market professionals. We find that the performance of all strategies is extremely sensitive to the choice of currency, lags parameters and the evaluation criteria. Nevertheless, nonlinear trends entail better results for G10 currencies, whereas we find mixed results for emerging market currencies. We also examine a volatility management procedure to alleviate crash risk. It indeed lowers maximum weekly losses, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis for most currencies in both strategies. Finally, nonlinear momentum strategies with volatility management improve both raw and risk-adjusted performance of about two thirds of the linear momentum strategies.