Managing risks in international securities portfolios

The bachelor´s thesis examines the gains from hedging the currency exposure from the perspectives of American and Canadian investors. It is shown that exchange rate risk is a largely nondiversifiable factor which might negatively affect the performance of equity portfolios. Therefore, it is necassary to effectively control the exchange rate risk. It is found that the effect of currency risk on total portfolio risk varies among different currency pairs depending predominantly on the correlation between equity and currency returns. For this reason, it is essential to choose a different approach for each currency pair. The hedging strategy, which is refered to as optimal currency hedging, aims at minimizing the volatility of currency hedged portfolio returns. The optimal hedge ratios for individual currencies are also estimated. Over the period from 2004 to 2015, hedging the currency exposure considerably reduced the volatility of returns in the case of American investor. From the perspective of Canadian investor, hedging the currency risk reduced the volatility of returns only to a limited degree. The reason is that Canadian dollar behaves in a pro-cyclical fashion, strenghtening when the world economy surges and weakening when the economy turns down. Therefore, foreign currency exposure tend to reduce the volatility of portfolio returns from the perspective of Canadian investor.