Evaluation of Bearish Option Payoffs in USD-INR Market

Although there exist many empirical studies on forward contracts to hedge the currency risk, the evidence for other types of derivatives like currency options are in minority. The literature regarding option payoffs especially in context of Indian foreign exchange contracts is very less. The present study fills this gap and has tried to assess the profitability of payoffs from adopting bearish option strategies on USD-INR. The study was done for a period of 68 months from October 2010 to June 2016. Strategies namely long put, short call and bear call spread were employed on USD-INR. Amongst all the strategies, 2% OTM short call performed better with least coefficient of variance. It was found that returns from option strategy for each of moneyness applied is not significantly different from zero. The returns from all the three bearish option strategies was further compared with the help of one-way ANOVA. It was found that there was no significant difference at 5% level of significance.