Foreign exchange market efficiency and profitability of trading rules: Evidence from a developing country

Lorna Katusiime, Abul Shamsuddin () and Frank Agbola

International Review of Economics & Finance, 2015, vol. 35, issue C, 315-332

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates market efficiency and trading rule profitability of the Ugandan foreign exchange market for the period January 1994 to June 2012. We test for market efficiency using a battery of variance ratio tests with superior size and power properties. We find that the Ugandan foreign exchange market is characterised by pricing inefficiency, except for a few brief episodes of efficiency. We also find that the Buy signals outperform the Sell signals in correctly predicting exchange rate movements, and yield higher returns. Investors can earn excess returns over a buy-and-hold strategy using trading rules but these returns diminish substantially after accounting for transaction costs. We conclude that the Ugandan foreign exchange market is generally characterised by weak-form inefficiency. However, market participants are unable to consistently exploit pricing inefficiencies due to transaction costs and time variation in the inefficiencies under changing market conditions. Our finding of time variation in market efficiency is consistent with the adaptive market hypothesis of Lo (2004).

Keywords: Foreign exchange market efficiency; Variance ratio tests; Trading rules; Uganda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F31 G14 G15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059056014001658
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reveco:v:35:y:2015:i:c:p:315-332

DOI: 10.1016/j.iref.2014.10.003

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Economics & Finance is currently edited by H. Beladi and C. Chen

More articles in International Review of Economics & Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().