Yes, OandA data are trustworthy. They are very careful in capturing all the data they can (that's a lot!) and processing it very carefully. But you have to read carefully what they are telling you about the numbers you are seeing! :-) (Read An Introduction to High-Frequency Finance by Michel Dacorogna, et al., to get an idea.) The big things to look for in treating OTC markets are timing, source, and price type. OandA, the US Fed, and the Bank of England (or any other source you have) give data for different times, different sources, and different "averages". Many researchers try to focus on a single-point source (say Reuters or Bloomberg feed) so the data are timestamped consistently, pick a particular time (say London 10 am or NY 2 pm), and quite often use just bid prices (or both bid and ask.) Any averaging across time or prices (like mid) changes the statistics, but if you know what you are dealing with, you can probably take it into account, at least partially, and it may make for smoother data series. and just to rag on it again, EUR/USD is the number of US dollars per Euro, the usual way of quoting this pair, currently around 1.1700 . David L. Reiner Rho Trading
-----Original Message----- From: r-sig-finance-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch [mailto:r-sig-finance- bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Ajay Narottam Shah Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2005 7:05 AM To: R-sig-finance Subject: [R-sig-finance] Is oanda.com data trustworthy? The EUR/USD currency market is very liquid and the data should be very sharp. But I see big differences between data on the US Federal reserve website and data on http://www.oanda.com (accessed using tseries::get.hist.quote()). Here are some examples: US Fed oanda 31-Oct-05 0.833681 0.8293 1-Nov-05 0.833472 0.829 2-Nov-05 0.828706 0.8325 3-Nov-05 0.835352 0.8286 4-Nov-05 0.845451 0.8374 When expressed as 100*log(p2/p1), the returns look like this: US Fed oanda.com 2005-11-01 -0.02507268 -0.03618163 2005-11-02 -0.57346603 0.42130667 2005-11-03 0.79877448 -0.46956922 2005-11-04 1.20170199 1.05643239 These differences seem huge to me! E.g. on 3 November, the US Fed says that returns were +0.798% and oanda.com says it's -0.469%. Here's the exact get.hist.quote incantation:
get.hist.quote("USD/EUR", provider="oanda", start="2005-10-31",
end="2005-11-04") trying URL
'http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxhistory?lang=en&date1=10%2F31%2F2005&dat e=
11%2F04%2F2005&date_fmt=us&exch=USD&exch2=&expr=EUR&expr2=&margin_fixed= 0&
&SUBMIT=Get+Table&format=ASCII&redirected=1'
Content type 'text/html' length unknown
opened URL
.......... ...
downloaded 13Kb
2005-10-31 2005-11-01 2005-11-02 2005-11-03 2005-11-04
0.8293 0.8290 0.8325 0.8286 0.8374
What should one do? :-(
--
Ajay Shah
ajayshah at mayin.org
http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah
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