Understanding Foreign Exchange Option Returns: The Information Content of Volatility

According to general asset pricing theory, options should reward their holders for the systematic risk they are bearing. In this paper, we study the returns of foreign exchange options. We find that, by sorting options according to the distance of their implied volatility from the historical volatility, we obtain portfolios with positive average monthly returns. These returns are not explained by standard aggregate risk factors, which suggest either that additional risk factors should be accounted for, or that investors behavior differs from the traditional paradigm of rational agents.