March 11th, 2010, 9:45 am
Ok,Firstly, for your specific examply of CAD/JPY (note market convention in terms of which way round to price), the euro is a red herring. This would price as usdjpy / usdcad. The problem with your suggestion of using eurjpy / eurcad as a way of getting round the whole usd holiday issue is 1) It doesnt always work that way (as banks who are pricing this stuff more often than not, when you drill down to actual trading floor logistics, fund in dollars anyway) and ii) as EUR/CAD is a derived price, all those calculations are still going on, you just can't see them. There's not nearly so much liquidity in straight eurcad (either in spot or in the swaps mkt).Secondly - in terms of date, you need to work out what your straight 1m date for the cross is. In the case of cadjpy, given that spot usd/cad is T+1 and spot usdjpy is T+2, it's going to be the later of the two and therefore be the same as the usdjpy (i.e. as of today I see 1m usdjpy as apr 15, 1m usdcad as apr 12 and for the cross also apr 15.Once you have all these dates to hand, you merely work out the bid / offer for the outright of both usd fx rates to your 1m cross date (i.e. straight 1m usdjpy and broken date 15 apr usdcad in this case) and then cross it up at the end.There may be other ways to achieve the same thing but that should work.Sorry - didn't quite grasp what the last part of your question meant...Hope that is at least of some help.Pascoe..