Carry Trade and Capital Market Returns in South Africa

This paper assesses the extent to which carry trade operations affect the performance of equity and bond markets in a target country, South Africa, by considering the US and the euro area as the funding countries. A two- and three-factor capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is employed to assess whether the pricing of equity and bond markets in South Africa depends on the US dollar/rand and euro/rand carry trade returns. Moreover, the paper uses the quantile regression technique to assess whether this pricing varies with the distribution of the equity and bond returns. The findings support that the US- and euro-funded carry trade are essential factors for the pricing of equity and bond markets in South Africa. Moreover, the results of the two-factor model show a negative relationship between the equity excess return and the US-carry trade returns at lower quantiles of the equity market returns. The positive relationship is observed in the upper quantiles of the equity market. The negative relationship means that carry trade activities reduce equity market returns during a bear market as investors close out their position when conditions in the equity market become unfavourable. The results of the three-factor model, controlling for the global volatility or uncertainty, show that carry trade investors exit the equity market to invest in the bond market when global uncertainty rises. This finding shows that carry trade investors choose less risky assets during rising global uncertainty.