The interrelationship between order flow, exchange rate, and the role of American economic news

Abstract The aim of this study is to investigate the comovement and interconnection between US economic news in seven different categories and the exchange rate of the US dollar against the currencies of seven developed countries, with the corresponding order flows. Our empirical investigation is based on using the Spearman correlation method to analyze the correlation between the economic news and exchange rate using order flows before, during, and after the financial news announcement. We use wavelet transform analysis to assess the comovement in the time–frequency domains. The bivariate outcomes demonstrate that changes in economic news impact price changes for only a short time, or even no time at all. Moreover, for longer time periods, the order flow is shown to have stronger coherency than economic news and a steady comovement against the exchange rate. Wavelet coherency reveals that the lead-lag effect of order flow changes on price changes starts in the medium frequency bands to low-frequency bands during the entire sample period. In addition, economic news weakens the correlation between exchange rate and order flow in the short run, which means that the combination of economic news and order flow can achieve a higher degree of consistency of exchange rate. The implication of this study is that macro policy makers, import and export enterprises, foreign exchange investors and exchange fund managers can predict the future exchange rate based on the order flow and choose hedging measures under different objectives.