This paper studies the effect of the Brexit vote on the intraday correlation and volatility transmission among major currencies. We find that the vote causes an increase in the correlation among the safe-haven currencies of the Swiss franc and Japanese yen as well as gold, and also find a decrease in their correlation with the directly involved currencies of British sterling and the Euro. These changes are due to the appreciation of the former group and the depreciation of the latter group which represents a flight to quality of investors. We also observe a substantial decrease in volatility transmission between British sterling and the Euro following the Brexit vote due to lower levels of market integration. However the volatility transmission among the currencies has increased in general and their net spillover is positively correlated with their level of volatility and trading activities. Therefore we document the significant impact of the politically important Brexit vote on the high frequency correlation and volatility spillover in the foreign exchange market.

This paper investigates a calendar effect, namely the weekend overreaction, in spot foreign exchange markets of 8 major and 9 emerging currencies. We find that after a large price difference between Friday close and subsequent Monday open, most markets are likely to reverse in multiple horizons during the following week, which is consistent with the overreaction hypothesis. We develop a reversal trading strategy to exploit this effect which we show are robust to transaction costs and interest rates. In the out-of-sample test, the strategy is able to generate abnormal risk-adjusted returns, which suggests that these currency markets might be weak-form inefficient.

To our knowledge, this paper is the first study on the effect of information arrival on the leadlag relationship among related spot instruments. Based on a large dataset of ultra-highfrequency transaction prices time-stamped to the millisecond of the S&P500 index and its two most liquid tracking ETFs, we find that their lead-lag relationship is affected by the rate of information arrival whose proxy is the unexpected trading volume of these instruments. Specifically, when information arrives, the leadership of the leading instrument may strengthen or weaken depending on whether the leading or lagging instrument responds to that information. An increase in the unexpected volume of the leader strengthens its leadership whereas an increase in the unexpected volume of the lagger weakens this leadership. In addition to the strength of leadership, an increase in the unexpected volume in response to information arrival may also have opposite effects on the lead-lag correlation coefficient depending on whether that volume increase belongs to the leader or the lagger. Finally, we find that sophisticated investors have a more significant effect on the lead-lag relationship than non-sophisticated ones.

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