Question: You are required to research the foreign currencies and select two foreign currencies to invest in for the account of one of your clients who has given you $20,000. Use $20,000 of your client's account in the two foreign currencies which you have selected to invest in based on a margin of 2% which gives you a high leverage (50 to 1), meaning you can invest up to $1,000,000 or 50 times of your client's balance either in currency spot market or currency futures. To keep things simple, use the currency spot market and you are recommended to choose two hard currencies such as the Euro, British Pound, Japanese Yen, Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, New Zealand Dollar, or Swiss Franc. The following are some more requirements for your research:
1. You may take a long or short position in each foreign currency or long position in one or short position on the other.
2. Justify your investment decisions based on a trend (uptrend or downtrend) analysis.
3. Justify your investment positions based on the relative inflation rate between two nations. For example, if the inflation rate is higher in the United States relative to the Euro Zone, all else equal, the Dollar would depreciate against the Euro.
4. Justify your investment positions based on the expected relative inflation rate between two nations. For example, if the inflation rate is expected to be higher in the United States relative to the Britain, all else equal, the Dollar would depreciate against the British Pound.
5. Justify your investment position based on the relative interest rate between two nations. For instance, if the Australian banks pay higher interest rate than the U.S. banks, investors or speculators would move their funds, all else equal or all other variables stay the same, to Australia to take advantage of the higher interest rate.
6. Similarly, you may justify your investment decisions based on expected interest rate between the two nations. For example, when investors expect higher interest rate in Canada, they would invest in Canadian denominated assets that, in turn, would cause the Canadian Dollar to appreciate, all other variables held fixed.
7. You may justify your investment decisions based on some other macroeconomic or fundamental analysis such as the unemployment rate, Gross Domestic Products, Trade Balance, and Capital Flows that you have learned from the textbook or some other outside materials.
8. Select the two currencies in your portfolio which have negative correlations or a weak correlation for the reduction of risk and risk management purpose.
9. Calculate your return for each investment and overall return.
10. Prepare your findings in an 8-page research report paper based on the APA format. Notes to Shareef: I have already chosen the two foreign currencies relative to the U.S currency, they are: the Chinese Yuan and the Canadian dollar.