Implied Distributions from Risk-Reversals and Brexit/Trump Predictions

In the 12 months from the middle of June 2016 to the middle of June 2017, a number of events occurred in a relatively short period of time, all of which either had, or had the potential to have, a considerably volatile impact upon financial markets.The events referred to here are the Brexit referendum (23 June 2016), the US election (8 November 2016), the 2017 French elections (23 April and 7 May 2017) and the surprise 2017 UK parliamentary election (8 June 2017).All of these events—the Brexit referendum and the Trump election in particular—were notable both for their impact upon financial markets after the event and the degree to which the markets failed to anticipate these events. A natural question to ask is whether these could have been predicted, given information freely available in the financial markets beforehand. In this paper, we focus on market expectations for price action around Brexit and the Trump election, based on information available in the traded foreign exchange options market.