Assessing the application of Islamic and conventional hedgings in Indonesia

Purpose Banks in Indonesia offer two currency-hedging mechanisms to business players to hedge their portfolio against exchange rate risk, namely, Islamic hedging and conventional hedging. Taking into account that Islamic finance stakeholders in Indonesia want to accelerate Islamic hedging transactions, assessing the feasibility of Islamic hedging to serve the business players is very important. Thus, this paper aims to compare the conventional and Islamic currency-hedging mechanisms, particularly to identify which one to be preferred by the business players, identify terms and conditions if Islamic hedging is more preferable, give information regarding the estimated profit and payment of the premium in adopting currency-hedging (both conventional and Islamic hedgings) and prove the workability of Islamic currency-hedging as a new hedging mechanism for the business players. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses qualitative research methodology by comparing Islamic and conventional hedging and a quantitative research method by using a forward contract formula. Technically, the paper conducts a static simulation of the forward transactions by using both conventional and Islamic hedgings to hedge the foreign exchange (forex) credit received by business players from banks. The forward contract simulation uses US dollar (USD) against Indonesian rupiah (IDR) from December 2003 to February 2019 and the forward premium uses both Islamic and conventional money market rates called PUAB (conventional interbank money market) rate and PUAS (Islamic interbank money market) rate. Findings The paper finds that Islamic hedging is more preferable to conventional one due to some considerations which are the number of profitable months, the minimum payment of premium and the highest payment of profit. However, even though the Islamic hedging mechanism has the advantage of having a higher Islamic money market rate than the conventional one, the economic condition (particularly the movement of IDR exchange rate) has to be considered as well particularly during the volatile exchange rate movement. Research limitations/implications The paper has not occupied macroeconomic variables such as inflation, GDP, international trade, as they might influence the movement of IDR exchange rate. In addition, it uses static simulation rather than a dynamic one. Originality/value This is the first paper assessing both Islamic and conventional hedging mechanisms in the case of Indonesia

Hedging with an Edge: Parametric Currency Overlay

We propose an optimal currency hedging strategy for global equity investors using currency value, carry, and momentum to proxy for expected currency returns. A benchmark risk constraint ensures the overlay closely mimics a fully hedged portfolio. We compare this with naïve and alternative hedges in a demanding out-of-sample test, with transaction and rebalancing costs and margin requirements. Other hedging methods generally reduce risk but at a cost. Some tend to short currencies with high returns and all incur substantial costs with frictions, mostly margin requirements and equity rebalancing costs. The proposed strategy uses predictable returns to reduce this cost. It produces a statistically significant 17% gain in Sharpe ratio and an annualized Jensen-α of 0.93% versus a fully hedged benchmark. Notably, most of the implementation costs of the strategy would be incurred by the benchmark anyway. This reduces its marginal cost and highlights a specific synergy of integrating hedging with speculation. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

VALUE-AT-RISK BASED APPROACH FOR CURRENCY HEDGING

Corporate FX risk management has gained complexity with an increased number of currencies involved and varying correlations among them. Existing literature has highlighted the need to account for cross-currency correlations when optimizing hedge ratios for portfolio management (Dowd, 1999). In this paper, we propose a Value-at-Risk (VaR) based model to estimate the optimal hedge ratio for a multi-national corporate that aims to minimize the cost of hedging at a given tolerance level of expected loss arising out of FX movement. The paper illustrates both parametric and historical methods of VaR estimation at a portfolio level as the first step in risk management. As a second step, an efficient-frontier is derived based on the expected VaR level at various hedge ratios and compared with associated hedge cost. The benefits of this approach include: identification of net exposures after correlations among currencies are accounted for in order to avoid duplication of hedges, and condensation of the parameters governing hedging decision into a single, intuitively-appealing number. The paper also highlights the need to frequently update the model’s assumptions as currency correlations and corporate exposures remain dynamic. JEL Classification Codes: C10, F31, G32, M20.

Currency hedging strategy using barrier options in the colombian market

<p><span>One of the main problems for the growth of the Colombian market is the short variety of investment instruments found in the local market. In this way, an exchange rate hedging strategy is proposed using exotic options, specifically, barrier-type options. These types of options are not offered in the Colombian market. Monte Carlo simulation is used to determine the effect that the hedging strategy has on currency risk. From the results, it is concluded that the exchange risk is decreased with the hedging strategy because the 5th and 95th percentiles are lower than in the scenario without hedging. Finally, the code that was used to model the barrier options is explained.</span></p>