Our main focus is on the Canadian-U.S. dollar exchange rate and oil prices, although
we demonstrate that similar results hold for other commodity prices/exchange rates pairs,
such as the Norwegian krone-U.S. dollar exchange rate and oil prices; the South African
rand-U.S. dollar exchange rate and gold prices; the Australian-U.S. dollar and oil prices
and the Chilean peso-U.S. dollar exchange rate and copper prices. We perform two distinct
exercises: out-of-sample Öt and truly out-of-sample forecasts. Our results suggest that there
is little systematic relation between commodity price changes and exchange rate changes
at the monthly and quarterly frequencies. In contrast, the very short-term, "out-of-sample
Öt" relationship between commodity prices and exchange rates is rather robust: our results
indicate that contemporaneous realized commodity prices are related to daily nominal exchange
rates of commodity currencies, and the relationship is statistically and economically
signiÖcant. On the other hand, the predictive ability of lagged realized commodity price
changes is more ephemeral, and allowing for time variation in the relative performance is
crucial to show that lagged commodity prices can be statistically signiÖcant predictors of exchange
rates out-of-sample. It is noteworthy that the out-of-sample predictive ability result
breaks down for monthly and quarterly data, thus suggesting that not only the predictive
ability is transitory, but also that the e§ects of oil price changes on exchange rate changes
are short-lived and that the frequency of the data is crucial to capture them.