This correlation was clearly negative for Aracruz during the financial crisis, when sales declined at the same time that the exchange rate increased. As a result, the optimal hedge for Aracruz would be a long position in a put option. Instead, management
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decided to hold a short position in a call option, by acquiring sell-target forwards contracts. A sensitive analysis also corroborates the conclusion that the company was speculating with derivatives (we omit the results for brevity). Even supposing that in 2008 Aracruz‟s revenue and EBIT followed the trend observed from 1999 to 2007, the effective hedge would be three times the optimal hedge. Coupled with the speculative strategy there was probably an error involved in computing the true risks of sell-target forwards.