This paper considers the impact of foreign exchange order flows on
contemporaneous and future stock market returns using a new database of
customer order flows in the €-$ exchange rate market as seen by a leading
European bank. We do not find clear contemporaneous relationships between FX
order flows and stock market changes at high frequencies, but FX flows do
appear to have significant power to forecast stock index returns over 1-minute
to 30-minute horizons, after controlling for lagged exchange rate and stock
market returns. The effects of order flows from financial customers on future
stock market changes are negative, while the effects of corporate orders are
positive. The latter results are consistent with the premise that corporate
order flows contain dispersed, passively acquired information about
fundamentals. Thus purchases of the dollar by corporate customers represent
good news about the state of the US economy. Importantly, though, there also
appears to be extra information in corporate flows which is directly relevant
to equity prices over and above the impact derived from stock prices reacting
to (predicted) exchange rate changes. Interpretation of the financial customer
results is more difficult, although our findings suggest that these flows only
affect stock prices through their impact on the value of the dollar.