1) From Bloomberg, download the exchange rates of 6 foreign currencies (at least 2 of them have to be from emerging markets) including the dollar.

2) Compute the one-year appreciation or depreciation against the dollar

(Hint: Remember, ($: U.S dollar, X: The foreign currency that you have chosen)

S_t(X/$) = Beginning Rate

S_t+1(X/$) = Ending Rate

The % appreciation (or depreciation) in X can be calculated as;

[(Ending Rate – Beginning Rate) / Beginning Rate] x 100

3) Explore recent exchange rate trends for the pairs of countries that you have selected (the time window depends on your choice, the wider the better). To plot trends, download the series to a spreadsheet.

4) Try to plot examples of some fixed and floating rates. Can you tell from the data, which countries are fixed and which are floating?

5) In the plots, can you locate data for an exchange rate crisis within your time-window?

Part 2:

Imagine you are a carry trader. Obtain one-month Swap rates for some major currencies: US dollar, pound, euro, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, and Austrian dollar (Hint: Google “ft.com money rates”). Find the lowest yield currency and call it X. How much interest would you pay in X units after borrowing X 1,000,000 for one month? (Hint: The raw data are annualized rates.) Compute the exchange rate between X and every other high yield currency Y. For each Y, compute how much X would be worth in Y units today, and then in a month’s time with Y-currency interest added. Revisit this question in a month’s time, find the spot rates at the moment, and compute the resulting profit from each carry trade. Did any of your imaginary trade pay off?

In part 1, please use exchange rate for the past ten year. I already download the data from the Bloomberg, you can use if you need it.