Forecasting mid-price movement of Bitcoin futures using machine learning

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, investors face challenges in understanding price dynamics across assets. This paper explores the performance of the various type of machine learning algorithms (MLAs) to predict mid-price movement for Bitcoin futures prices. We use high-frequency intraday data to evaluate the relative forecasting performances across various time frequencies, ranging between 5 and 60-min. Our findings show that the average classification accuracy for five out of the six MLAs is consistently above the 50% threshold, indicating that MLAs outperform benchmark models such as ARIMA and random walk in forecasting Bitcoin futures prices. This highlights the importance and relevance of MLAs to produce accurate forecasts for bitcoin futures prices during the COVID-19 turmoil

Connectedness of energy markets around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic

his paper studies the connectedness among energy equity indices of oil-exporting and oil-importing countries around the world. For each country, we construct time-varying measures of how much shocks this country transmits to other countries and how much shocks this country receives from other countries. We analyze the network of countries and find that, on average, oil-exporting countries are mainly transmitting shocks, and oil-importing countries are mainly receiving shocks. Furthermore, we use panel data regressions to evaluate whether the connectedness among countries is influenced by economic sentiment, uncertainty, and the global COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the connectedness among countries increases significantly in periods of uncertainty, low economic sentiment, and COVID-19 problems. This implies that diversification benefits across countries are severely reduced exactly during crises, that is, during the times when diversification benefits are most important

Investor attention and idiosyncratic risk in cryptocurrency markets

We explore the impact of investor attention on idiosyncratic risk in the cryptocurrency markets. Taking the Google Trends Index as the measure of investor attention, we find that investor attention can significantly reduce cryptocurrencies’ idiosyncratic risks by increasing the liquidity. We further study possible cross-sectional variations of the effect of investor attention on idiosyncratic risk. Evidence shows that the investor attention effect is more pronounced for smaller-cap and younger cryptocurrencies. Moreover, a relatively stable external market environment and rising market state are conducive to the further play of the attention effect

Riding the wave of crypto-exuberance: the potential misusage of corporate blockchain announcements

Cryptocurrencies have been broadly scrutinised in recent times for a host of concerning regulatory and cybercriminality issues. Although steps have been taken to promote regulatory sufficiency in the near future, we examine the avenues through which this extremely high-risk industry can derive potentially devastating contagion channels, influencing both unwilling and unsuspecting investors. We focus this research on the expressions of interest by publicly traded companies across the world to utilise cryptocurrency and blockchain projects. We find evidence that there exists a substantial stock price premium and sustained increase in volatility in the aftermath of blockchain announcements, with emphasis on highly-speculative motives such as coin creation and corporate name changes. Changes in price discovery and information flows are found to be largely determined from cryptocurrency-based pricing sources in the aftermath of speculative announcements. We discuss the inherent ethical and legal issues, considering as to whether such announcements are simply an attempt to artificially manipulate share prices and take part in the current phase of crypto-exuberance

Statistical arbitrage: Factor investing approach

We introduce a continuous time model for stock prices in a general factor representation with the noise driven by a geometric Brownian motion process. We derive the theoretical hitting probability distribution for the long-until-barrier strategies and the conditions for statistical arbitrage. We optimize our statistical arbitrage strategies with respect to the expected discounted returns and the Sharpe ratio. Bootstrapping results show that the theoretical hitting probability distribution is a realistic representation of the empirical hitting probabilities. We test the empirical performance of the long-until-barrier strategies using US equities and demonstrate that our trading rules can generate statistical arbitrage profits

The financial market effects of international aviation disasters

The spread of misinformation with regards to aviation disasters continues to be a point of concern for aviation companies. Much of this information usually surrounds speculation based on the cause and responsibility attributed to the incident, implicitly possessing the potential to generate significant financial market price volatility. In this paper, we investigate a number of stylised facts relating to the effects of airline disasters on aviation stocks, while considering contagion effects, information flows and the sources of price discovery within the broad sector. Results indicate a substantially elevated levels of share price volatility in the aftermath of aviation disasters, while cumulative abnormal returns present sharp under-performance of the analysed companies relative to international exchanges. When considering an EGARCH analysis, we observe that share price volatility appears to be significantly influenced by the scale of the disaster in terms of the fatalities generated. Significant contagion effects upon the broad aviation index along with substantial changes in traditional price discovery channels are also identified. The role that the spread of information on social media, whether it be correct or of malicious origins, cannot be eliminated as an explanatory factor of these changing dynamics over time and region

Statistical arbitrage in the multi-asset Black–Scholes economy

In this study, we consider the statistical arbitrage definition given in Hogan, S, R Jarrow, M Teo and M Warachka (2004). Testing market efficiency using statistical arbitrage with applications to momentum and value strategies, Journal of Financial Economics, 73, 525–565 and derive the statistical arbitrage condition in the multi-asset Black–Scholes economy building upon the single asset case studied in Göncü, A (2015). Statistical arbitrage in the Black Scholes framework. Quantitative Finance, 15(9), 1489–1499. Statistical arbitrage profits can be generated if there exists at least one asset in the economy that satisfies the statistical arbitrage condition. Therefore, adding a no-statistical arbitrage condition to no-arbitrage pricing models is not realistic if not feasible. However, with an example we show that what excludes statistical arbitrage opportunities in the Black–Scholes economy, and possibly in other complete market models, is the presence of uncertainty or stochasticity in the model parameters. Furthermore, we derive analytical formulas for the expected value and probability of loss of the statistical arbitrage portfolios and compute optimal boundaries to sell the risky assets in the portfolio by maximizing the expected return with a constraint on the probability of loss

Partial hedging and cash requirements in discrete time

This paper develops a discrete time version of the continuous time model of Bouchard et al. [J. Control Optim., 2009, 48, 3123–3150], for the problem of finding the minimal initial data for a controlled process to guarantee reaching a controlled target with probability one. An efficient numerical algorithm, based on dynamic programming, is proposed for the quantile hedging of standard call and put options, exotic options and quantile hedging with portfolio constraints. The method is then extended to solve utility indifference pricing, good-deal bounds and expected shortfall problems

A stochastic model for commodity pairs trading

In this study, we introduce an optimal pairs trading model and verify its performance in the commodity futures markets. Empirical evidence from commodity futures indicates the existence of significant mean reversion together with high peak and fat tails for the distribution of spread residuals. Therefore, we assume an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process with the noise term driven by a Lévy process with generalized hyperbolic distributed marginals. Our model not only provides trading signals, but also can be considered as a pair screening technique to rank all potential pairs for trade priority in terms of the distance to the expected profit-maximizing thresholds. Empirical examples and backtesting results obtained from commodity futures data show strong support for the profitability of the model even in the presence of transaction costs