Quote from SomeYoungGuy:
I'm still working on my strategy, trying out all kinds of things. I'm backtesting, curve fitting, and optimizing as I figure out how the forex markets move.
I test my strats against the euro, the Aussie, cable, Swiss Franc, Loonie, I can tweak my inputs to make a paper profit. Nothing that I will put real money into yet, but I'm just playing around. But the Yen remains elusive. I'm trying RTM, trend following, blends of the two, but everything falls on its face against the Yen.
Anybody else have the same experience? Why is the Yen so different from all the other majors?
The yen is different, because it's an economy with a large amount of domestic savings and a large number of Mrs Watanabe's, who absolutely love to punt FX in their spare time.
I can't disagree with much of what you state above...disagree with that as reason because when you look at most of the inter-bank flows in yen (and all others) the money originates mostly with CBs, real money, and hedgers, rather than speculative retail money. While it is true that there was a time when a lot of housewives in Japan punted fx that trend may have been temporary, at least I have not heard nor read of such since after the financial crisis. Looks like a lot of the carry trade mommies got flushed out badly.
What I discovered re yen was that except the times when risk was taken onto/off the books, which is when there is a lot of one-way flow in/out of the yen, the yen as basket contributes actually very little to all yen crosses. You can see that when you run a PCA on the pairs by perusing the contributing baskets (eg., USDJPY, the dollar and yen baskets). The same can be found when you correlate the yen basket with USDJPY, for example, and also correlate the dollar basket with USDJPY. You see that except during strong risk on/off time spans, the dollar flow dominates the yen in driving USDJPY. That's just a quantitative reason.
Obviously a lot of currencies, but particularly the yen are skewed for years now due to the unprecedented central bank involvement. That is definitely messing with the market but I find it harder to quantify.
I can't disagree with much of what you state above...
However, IMHO, the underlying core phenomenon remains simply that Japan is a society with a lot of savings (corporate and consumer) and not a lot of places to invest.
This is one of the reasons (I think I have posted a link to this chart before):but those savings are all parked/locked up in pension accounts. Nobody trades those, most of those savings are even never currency converted as they are invested in JGBs, local agency bonds, and domestic equities. What makes you believe those savings impact the yen? Thanks