The microscopic relationships between triangular arbitrage and cross-currency correlations in a simple agent based model of foreign exchange markets

Foreign exchange rates movements exhibit significant cross-correlations even on very short time-scales. The effect of these statistical relationships become evident during extreme market events, such as flash crashes. Although a deep understanding of cross-currency correlations would be clearly beneficial for conceiving more stable and safer foreign exchange markets, the microscopic origins of these interdependencies have not been extensively investigated. This paper introduces an agent-based model which describes the emergence of cross-currency correlations from the interactions between market makers and an arbitrager. The model qualitatively replicates the time-scale vs. cross-correlation diagrams observed in real trading data, suggesting that triangular arbitrage plays a primary role in the entanglement of the dynamics of different foreign exchange rates. Furthermore, the model shows how the features of the cross-correlation function between two foreign exchange rates, such as its sign and value, emerge from the interplay between triangular arbitrage and trend-following strategies. In particular, the interaction of these trading strategies favors certain combinations of price trend signs across markets, thus altering the probability of observing two foreign exchange rates drifting in the same or opposite direction. Ultimately, this entangles the dynamics of foreign exchange rate pairs, leading to cross-correlation functions that resemble those observed in real trading data.