How Did The Currency Pundits Do In 2016?

Marshall Gittler, Head of , FXPRIMUS.com

It’s that time of year again when I do my favorite column, in which I ask:  how did the FX experts perform last year? I’m going to look at the “market consensus” forecast for currencies at the beginning of 2016 to see what value, if any, the FX forecasting community added to our sum of worldly knowledge.

The answer this year is actually good:  the pundits did pretty well in forecasting the dollar in 2016. Other currencies though…not so well.

For “market consensus,” I’m using the Bloomberg forecasts at the beginning of the year. Bloomberg collects forecasts for the major currencies from economists at the major banks and professional forecasters. It then takes the median of these forecasts and publishes that as the “market consensus.”

The simplest way to measure the performance is just to look at the direction:  did the currency go up or down vs the dollar as forecast? Looking at 31 major currencies, in 2015 the market consensus got the direction right only 55% of the time, or little better than a coin toss. This year though, the pundit community did substantially better:  they got 20 right, or 65%.

The forecasts were pretty accurate, too. Using the absolute value of the discrepancies between the forecast change and the actual change, the median forecast was only 3.4% off the actual turnout (average was 6.2%).

The graph shows the forecasts on the Y axis and the actual returns on the X axis. A correct forecast would lie on the yellow line. A currency above the line did worse than expected; one below the line, better.

 

 

As a control, at the beginning of the year I also used Excel’s RANDOM() function to forecast the direction. I just generated “up” or “down” calls randomly, not the actual rate. Alas, my super-duper quantitative forecasting technique, which I’ve named Gittler’s Unbiased Electronic Simulation Scorecard, or GUESS, only got 17 right or 55% -- about what you’d expect from a random program and this year not as good as the experts.

What were the big outliers? Several of them had to do with political surprises. The pound was forecast to rise, but needless to say it plunged – the vote for Brexit was a surprise. Same with MXN, which plummeted because of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the US election. TRY weakened far more than forecast following the coup in Turkey.

On the other hand, a number of the commodity currencies performed unexpectedly well, most notably BRL. It was forecast to fall by 5.6%, but in the event it rose by 22%! Adding on the high level of short-term rates in Brazil, anyone with a short position in BRL would’ve suffered grievously. The ZAR was expected to remain pretty steady, but actually rose 12.6%. The experts were bullish on RUB but not bullish enough. Finally, NZD was forecast to decline, but the turnaround in milk prices towards the end of the year resulted in a gain.

Among the G10, the yen was forecast to decline by 3.8% but wound up rising 2.8%; not that big a difference, but an important one in such a key currency. On the other hand, the euro forecast was pretty much spot on:  it was forecast to fall 1.5% and in the event fell 3.2%. Not bad!

But before you start believing what everyone on CNBC says, note that we are only talking about the forecasts against the dollar. The market expected the dollar to be up, and got it right. But what about all the other cross-currency forecasts embedded in these forecasts? We can get an idea of how well the pundits did outside of the dollar by looking at the forecasts against the euro. Here, the record isn’t so great. In fact, it’s pretty bad. In this case, the experts only got the direction right 11 out of 31 times or 36% -- far worse than tossing a coin. My extraordinarily sophisticated GUESS methodology on the other hand got 58% right – almost tradable!

 

 

I do this exercise annually for two reasons. One, I think it’s valuable to look at how the experts did to remind us not to believe uncritically everything we hear or read. Yes, some very smart people do spend a lot of time thinking about currencies and analyzing the world economy and it’s well worth hearing what they have to say. They may well think of things that had escaped us and provide some valuable insights. But just because they’re smart and knowledgeable doesn’t mean they’re always right. Unexpected and inherently unpredictable events – so-called “black swans” – can and do occur. Sometimes things just don’t go as expected. And just because events flow logically in retrospect doesn’t mean that they can be reliably forecast in advance.

This shouldn’t get us discouraged, though. The second reason I do this is to demonstrate that the small investor actually has a fighting chance against the experts:  they can and do get it wrong sometimes, too. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom.

 

 

 

 

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.