Distribution of USD/CAD daily high and low during a day
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Written by Mikhail Kopytine   
Friday, 09 April 2010 07:38

USD/CAD is a purely North-American currency pair and it's interesting to compare its temporal patterns of activity with other forex pairs. American session dominates here. Temporal distributions of volatility are also available (see the one for USD/CAD here) can be used in a model context to reproduce these daily high and low distributions.

 

 

Timing of daily high and low, USD/CAD, 2003-2009, CET 1.1 Timing of daily high, USD/CAD, 2003-2009 year by year, CET 1.2 Timing of daily low, USD/CAD, 2003-2009 year by year, CET 1.3

Fig.1. Distribution of time moments when USD/CAD daily high and low are achieved, 2003-2009. 1.1: high and low, all years added; 1.2: high only, all years separately; 1.3: low only, all years separately. The hatched bands indicate Poissonian statistical error estimates for the bin contents.

Tokyo 9 1011 1213 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 2223 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Central Europe 123456789101112 13141516171819202122230
Greenwich 01234567891011 121314151617181920212223
Eastern US 19202122230123456 789101112131415161718

Table 1. Time zone conversion table. Seasonal time shifts, such as daylight saving time, may complicate the picture if the nations choose to enact them on different days, and are ignored.

Fig.1 histograms the moments of time daily extreme price levels (either low and high) are achieved. The horizontal axis is split into 24 bins, for 24 hours of the day. Bin boundaries are at 00:00, 01:00, and so on -- in Central European time. As with other forex rates, the distribution for USD/CAD demonstrates a high degree of predictability in the times of occurrence of daily extremes.

Central Europen time is chosen for the following reason. Forex week begins, roughly speaking (since the volume increase is gradual) on Sunday 5pm and ends Friday 6pm Eastern time. It is convenient to define this week to consist of 5 full days, from 6pm Sunday to 6pm Friday New York time. When it's 6pm in New York, it's midnight in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Geneva and Frankfurt. These cities use Central European Time or CET. Therefore, the convenience of using CET is that one gets 5 non-interrupted, full 24-hour long trading days per week. Table 1 compares four time zones including major trading centers of the world.

The vertical axis of the histogram is simply the number of times, during the period of 2003-2009, when the daily high or low occured within the speficied time bin.

As has been seen with other forex pairs, there are three major activity peaks corresponding to Japan, Europe and the US. Active trading likely begins around 8am in the morning in each of these zones. The Japan is unique is that the activity seems to be highly peaked within a single burst just at the beginning of the trading day there (8am-9am Tokyo time) -- a common observation with all forex pairs looked at so far. The European and American activity patterns, in contrast to Japan, is characterized by near constancy for several hours.

The two bottom panels of Fig.1 prove that the activity pattern reproduces itself with a fair degree of stability year after year.

For the hour-scale trading system currently under development, information such as this may help improve the system performance by eliminating time intervals with little profit potential from consideration. A discretionary trader can use this information to help identify large moves happening at unusual times. Such an event may indicate a signficant shift in the balance of market forces. It may serve as an advance warning, alerting the trader to a possibility of an even larger move in the same direction during the regular hours of the pair's activity.

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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 April 2010 12:16 )
 

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