Market efficiency and automated trading

The dissertation thesis deals with the problem efficiency of the spot currency market. The main aim of this thesis is to verify the Efficient-market hypothesis on the majo foreign exchange pairs, and especially in the short term. The author focuses on the effective functioning of foreign exchange markets. The behaiour of the five main spot foreign exchange pairs - EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/CHF, USD/JPY and USD/CAD was analyzed in the thesis. Due to the increasing rise of intraday trades and growing popularity of margin accounts among retail investors, spot rates have been investigated primarily through a high-frequency data, that were collected for a period equal to or shorter than one day. The hypothesis of the effective exchange rate behaviour was verified by both using statistical methods, such as through automated trading systems, which were designed to assess the economic importance of the theory and to exclude or confirm the possibility of achieving above-average profits of retail investors on the foreign exchange markets