The skewness risk premium in currency markets

This paper examines the relationship between currency option's implied skewness and its future realized skewness, where the difference is known as the skewness risk premium (SRP). The SRP indicates whether investors pay a premium to be insured against future crash risk. Past investigations about implied and realized skewness within currency markets showed that both measures are loosely connected or even exhibit a negative relationship that cannot be rationalized by no-arbitrage arguments. Therefore, this paper studies time-series of future and option contract positions data in order to explain the disconnection in terms of investor's position-induced demand pressure. While demand pressures on options do not sufficiently contribute to the disconnection, there is evidence that, surprisingly, demand pressure in currency future markets have the power to explain this market anomaly. Furthermore, currency momentum also plays an important role, which leads to a strong cyclical demand for OTM calls in rising or OTM puts in declining markets. In order to exploit the disconnection of skewness, a simple skew swap trading strategy proposed by Schneider (2012) has been set up. The resulting skew swap returns are relatively high, but the return distribution is extremely fat-tailed. To appropriately compare different skew swap strategy returns, this paper proposes a Higher Moment Sharpe Ratio that also takes higher moments into account. •FX Skewness Risk Premium is significant for the majority of exchange rate markets.•FX realized and implied skewness does not match no-arbitrage requirements.•Skewness anomaly is primarily driven by future market pressures and FX momentum.•Skew swap strategies appear highly profitable when exploiting this anomaly.