Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Help with foreign exchange assignment

Today I helped a student who has an assignment to explain possible reasons for the movements in the yen, dollar and Euro day by day for a given time period. I suggested possibly looking several days before the selected time period to see what was being reported. We found some good results with this search:

Use Factiva, we selected Reuters as a source (available in many languages, which can be selected, and also covering markets around the globe) and subject selected: Foreign exchange news and a search (yen or dollar or euro and up or down or drift or increase or decrease or drop or lower or higher). (We got some of these terms by looking at a story. If you only type in yen or dollar or euro, you may only retrieve the daily closing values, without an explanation.) One of the main things traders were waiting for was the news from the Federal Reserve Board, which met today and raised rates. But the articles also indicate other government reports, such as new home starts, employment, consumer buying, the weather, as factors.

When he said he needed it day by day, we tried limiting it day by day, which works. I suggested if he had a certain number of days to search, to use the feature on Factiva to bring up the results showing the oldest first as this would indicate what factors were being considered from the first day of the period. We also took into consideration the time differences around the globe.

No comments: