Chapter 17 Foreign Exchange, Quantos and Inflation
Three markets that look unrelated on a trading floor are one piece of mathematics. An exchange rate is the price of one numeraire in units of another; a quanto is a payoff settled in the wrong numeraire; and inflation is foreign exchange with the real economy as the foreign country, the consumer price index as the exchange rate and index-linked bonds as the foreign bonds. One adjustment, , does the work in all three, and we derive it once and then spend the chapter recognising it. It ends by explaining a correction on year-on-year inflation swaps that is worth a dozen basis points at the long end and is invisible to anyone who has not made the identification.
17.1 An Exchange Rate Is a Ratio of Numeraires
Chapter 6 defined a numeraire as a strictly positive tradable that other prices are quoted against, and showed that each numeraire carries its own measure in which prices divided by it are martingales. Foreign exchange is what happens when there are two of them and they belong to different countries.
Let be the spot exchange rate, quoted as units of domestic currency per unit of foreign. Let and be the two savings accounts, growing at the domestic and foreign short rates and .
Calculation 17.1 (The forward exchange rate).
A domestic investor can hold the foreign savings account, but only by first converting into it. What they hold, valued in their own currency, is — and this is a domestic tradable, so it must have drift under the domestic risk neutral measure. Since grows deterministically at ,
| (17.1) |
which forces
| (17.2) |
The exchange rate drifts at the interest rate differential. Integrating, the forward rate is
| (17.3) |
Remark (What this says in words).
If foreign interest rates are higher than domestic, the forward exchange rate is below the spot: the currency you earn more interest in is expected — under the pricing measure — to weaken by exactly the extra interest. It has to be, or borrowing domestically, converting, lending abroad and selling the proceeds forward would be a riskless profit. This is covered interest parity, and it is not an economic prediction. It is a no-arbitrage statement, enforced by anyone with access to both money markets.
That this is not an economic prediction deserves emphasis, because the historical record disagrees with it loudly: high-yielding currencies have not on average weakened by their interest differential, which is the entire basis of the carry trade. Chapter 6’s distinction applies exactly here. (17.3) is a statement about ; the carry trade is a bet about ; and the gap between them is a risk premium, not an arbitrage.
Remark (The symmetry, and what breaks it).
Nothing above singled out the domestic currency. The foreign investor sees the exchange rate and, by the same argument in reverse, finds it drifts at under their risk neutral measure. Both are right. The two measures differ, and under the foreign measure is not the reciprocal of under the domestic one in any naive sense — by Itô’s lemma the reciprocal of a lognormal picks up a in its drift, and that term is exactly the difference between the two measures.
This is Siegel’s paradox, and it is the first sign that being careless about which currency one is standing in is expensive. The rest of the chapter is about the cases where it is expensive by an amount someone quotes.
Calculation 17.2 (Options on the exchange rate).
Since (17.2) is a geometric Brownian motion with drift , everything in chapter 5 applies with playing the part of a dividend yield: the foreign currency pays interest to whoever holds it, exactly as a stock pays dividends. The price of a call on the exchange rate is
| (17.4) |
which is Black-76 on the forward (17.3). Under its own name this is the Garman-Kohlhagen formula; it is not a new formula, so that everything already established about the Black world — the smile of chapter 9, the dynamics of chapter 10 — transfers without rederivation.
17.2 The Quanto Adjustment
Now the case where the two currencies genuinely interfere.
Definition 17.3 (Quanto).
A quanto is a derivative whose payoff is computed from a foreign asset but paid in domestic currency at a fixed exchange rate.
A typical example: a note paying the return on a foreign equity index, in dollars, with no currency exposure. The buyer wants the index and not the currency, and the quanto gives them exactly that. Someone has to price the separation.
Theorem 17.4 (The quanto drift adjustment).
Let be a foreign asset with volatility , let be the exchange rate (domestic per foreign) with volatility , and let be their correlation. Then under the domestic risk neutral measure,
| (17.5) |
and the quanto forward of to time is the ordinary forward multiplied by .
Proof.
is a foreign tradable, so under the foreign risk neutral measure it drifts at . To value a payoff settled at home we need its drift under , so we need the change of measure between them, and the Radon-Nikodym derivative is fixed by the requirement that the converted asset be a domestic tradable.
Remark (Why the cross term is the whole story).
The proof is three lines and every one of them is the Itô cross term .
Converting a foreign asset into domestic currency means multiplying two random quantities. If they tend to move together, the product moves more than either — you get more foreign currency exactly when each unit of it is worth more — and that extra covariance is worth something. A domestic investor holding the unhedged foreign asset receives it. A quanto buyer has been given the asset with the currency stripped out, so they do not receive it, and the price has to be lower by exactly that amount. Equation (17.5) is that statement with the accounting done.
Example 17.1 (The size of it).
A foreign index with volatility, a currency with volatility, correlation . The adjustment is
so the one year quanto forward is where the plain forward is .
A hundred and twenty five basis points a year is easy to dismiss on a short trade and impossible to dismiss on a long one, because it is a drift and compounds. At five years the forward is six percent below the plain one. This is the reason the adjustment is quoted as a drift rather than as a price: the number that matters is the rate, and the maturity does the rest.