FOLLOW THE MONEY

摘要

Now that institutional investors are giving more thought to currencies as an asset class, one question is what to use for benchmarking. Equity managers have the S&P 500 index; bond investors have the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate Bond Index. What tools do foreign exchange traders use? There now exists as wide an array of benchmarks for foreign exchange as there are investment strategies.The providers include Cuerex Group, which last year formed a partnership with FTSE to produce forex indexes; MSCI, divested by Morgan Stanley in 2009; and Deutsche Bank's huge foreign exchange operation. Compiling the S&P 500 is relatively easy because it uses closing prices, but there's nothing similar for foreign exchange, which lacks any central pricing mechanism. As a result, forex indexes show about as much variety as currencies themselves. One key difference is weighting; another is whether the index is primarily designed for hedging or achieving profits.