Search Results (44)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the global economy and financial markets. In this article, we explore the impact of the pandemic on the weak-form efficiency of the cryptocurrency and forex markets by conducting a comprehensive comparative analysis of the two markets. To estimate the weak-form of market efficiency, we utilize the asymmetric market deficiency measure (MDM) derived using the asymmetric multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (A-MF-DFA) approach, along with fuzzy entropy, Tsallis entropy, and Fisher information. Initially, we analyze the temporal evolution of these four measures using overlapping sliding windows. Subsequently, we assess both the mean value and variance of the distribution for each measure and currency in two distinct time periods: before and during the pandemic. Our findings reveal distinct shifts in efficiency before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, there was a clear increase in the weak-form inefficiency of traditional currencies during the pandemic. Among cryptocurrencies, BTC stands out for its behavior, which resembles that of traditional currencies. Moreover, our results underscore the significant impact of COVID-19 on weak-form market efficiency during both upward and downward market movements. These findings could be useful for investors, portfolio managers, and policy makers. Full article

The relationship between foreign exchange rates and crude oil prices holds significant importance in comprehending the dynamics of oil markets and their implications for diverse economies. This study utilizes the time-varying copula to examine the interrelationships between foreign exchange rates (FX) and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices, with a focus on time-varying tail dependence and time-varying linear correlation. We found that the tail dependence between foreign exchange rates (FX) and WTI crude oil prices is higher for oil-exporting countries compared to oil-importing countries. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has further amplified the tail dependence for oil-exporting countries while simultaneously increasing the correlation of FXs–WTI for oil-importing countries. However, the 2022 Russian–Ukrainian conflict has exerted a significant receding effect on both the tail dependence and linear correlation of FXs–WTI, reaching or even surpassing levels comparable to those witnessed during the 2008 financial crisis. These results facilitate policymakers, investors, and market participants in making well-informed decisions and developing effective risk management strategies. Full article

In the realm of foreign exchange (Forex) market predictions, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been commonly employed. However, these models often exhibit instability due to vulnerability to data perturbations attributed to their monolithic architecture. Hence, this study proposes a novel neuroscience-informed modular network that harnesses closing prices and sentiments from Yahoo Finance and Twitter APIs. Compared to monolithic methods, the objective is to advance the effectiveness of predicting price fluctuations in Euro to British Pound Sterling (EUR/GBP). The proposed model offers a unique methodology based on a reinvigorated modular CNN, replacing pooling layers with orthogonal kernel initialisation RNNs coupled with Monte Carlo Dropout (MCoRNNMCD). It integrates two pivotal modules: a convolutional simple RNN and a convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). These modules incorporate orthogonal kernel initialisation and Monte Carlo Dropout techniques to mitigate overfitting, assessing each module’s uncertainty. The synthesis of these parallel feature extraction modules culminates in a three-layer Artificial Neural Network (ANN) decision-making module. Established on objective metrics like the Mean Square Error (MSE), rigorous evaluation underscores the proposed MCoRNNMCD–ANN’s exceptional performance. MCoRNNMCD–ANN surpasses single CNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, and the state-of-the-art hybrid BiCuDNNLSTM, CLSTM, CNN–LSTM, and LSTM–GRU in predicting hourly EUR/GBP closing price fluctuations. Full article

In this paper, a hybrid of a Wavelet Decomposition–Generalised Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity–Extreme Value Theory (WD-ARMA-GARCH-EVT) model is applied to estimate the Value at Risk (VaR) of BitCoin (BTC/USD) and the South African Rand (ZAR/USD). The aim is to measure and compare the riskiness of the two currencies. New and improved estimation techniques for VaR have been suggested in the last decade in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. This paper aims to provide an improved alternative to the already existing statistical tools in estimating a currency VaR empirically. Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) and two mother wavelet filters on the returns series are considered in this paper, viz., the Haar and Daubechies (d4). The findings show that BitCoin/USD is riskier than ZAR/USD since it has a higher VaR per unit invested in each currency. At the 99% significance level, BitCoin/USD has average values of VaR of 2.71% and 4.98% for the WD-ARMA-GARCH-GPD and WD-ARMA-GARCH-GEVD models, respectively; and this is slightly higher than the respective 2.69% and 3.59% for the ZAR/USD. The average BitCoin/USD returns of 0.001990 are higher than ZAR/USD returns of −0.000125. These findings are consistent with the mean-variance portfolio theory, which suggests a higher yield for riskier assets. Based on the p-values of the Kupiec likelihood ratio test, the hybrid model adequacy is largely accepted, as p-values are greater than 0.05, except for the WD-ARMA-GARCH-GEVD models at a 99% significance level for both currencies. The findings are helpful to financial risk practitioners and forex traders in formulating their diversification and hedging strategies and ascertaining the risk-adjusted capital requirement to be set aside as a cushion in the event of the occurrence of an actual loss. Full article

Data stream mining (DSM) represents a promising process to forecast financial time series exchange rate. Financial historical data generate several types of cyclical patterns that evolve, grow, decrease, and end up dying. Within historical data, we can notice long-term, seasonal, and irregular trends. All these changes make traditional static machine learning models not relevant to those study cases. The statistically unstable evolution of financial market behavior yields a progressive deterioration in any trained static model. Those models do not provide the required characteristics to evolve continuously and sustain good forecasting performance as the data distribution changes. Online learning without DSM mechanisms can also miss sudden or quick changes. In this paper, we propose a possible DSM methodology, trying to cope with that instability by implementing an incremental and adaptive strategy. The proposed algorithm includes the online Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm (SGD), whose weights are optimized using the Particle Swarm Optimization Metaheuristic (PSO) to identify repetitive chart patterns in the FOREX historical data by forecasting the EUR/USD pair’s future values. The data trend change is detected using a statistical technique that studies if the received time series instances are stationary or not. Therefore, the sliding window size is minimized as changes are detected and maximized as the distribution becomes more stable. Results, though preliminary, show that the model prediction is better using flexible sliding windows that adapt according to the detected distribution changes using stationarity compared to learning using a fixed window size that does not incorporate any techniques for detecting and responding to pattern shifts. Full article

In this paper, the generalised extreme value distribution (GEVD) model is employed to estimate financial risk in the form of return levels and the value at risk (VaR) for the two exchange rates, BitCoin/US dollar (BTC/USD) and the South African rand/US dollar (ZAR/USD). The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) responsible for developing supervisory guidelines for banks and financial trading desks recommended that VaR be computed and reported. The maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method is used to estimate the parameters of the GEVD. The estimated risk values are used to compare the riskiness of the two exchange rates and help both traders and investors to define their position in forex trading. This is to helping understanding the risk they are taking when they convert their savings/investments to BitCoin instead of the South African currency, the rand. The high extreme value index associated with the BTC/USD compared to the ZAR/USD implies that BitCoin is riskier than the rand. The BTC/USD has higher values of expected extreme/tail losses of 13.44%, 18.02%, and 23.41% at short (6 months), medium (12 months), and long (24 months) terms, compared to the ZAR/USD expected extreme/tail losses of 2.40%, 2.84%, and 3.28%, respectively. The computed VaR estimates for losses of USD 0.17, USD 0.22, and USD 0.38 per dollar invested in BTC/USD at 90%, 95%, and 99%, compared to ZAR/USD’s USD 0.03, USD 0.03, and USD 0.04 at the respective confidence levels, confirm the high risk associated with BitCoin. The conclusion drawn from this study is that BTC/USD is riskier than ZAR/USD, despite the rand being a developing country’s currency, hence perceived as being risky. The perception is that the rand is riskier than BitCoin and perceptions do influence exchange rates. Kupiec’s backtest results confirmed the model’s adequacy. These findings are helpful to investors, traders, and risk managers when deciding on trading positions for the two currencies. Full article

This study follows Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) to examine the existing literature on the connectedness of green bonds with other markets as an attempt to highlight the effectiveness of green bonds in risk management and the benefits associated with incorporating green bonds in investment portfolios. An extensive search of relevant research papers to the scope of the review led to the identification of 31 articles published by February 2022. Our analysis traces the evolution of studies on green bonds’ interactions with other markets, the methodologies and data frequencies used for cross-market relations analysis, and the role of green bonds in portfolio risk management (diversifier, hedge, and safe-haven) in normal and extreme market conditions. The study reports several interesting findings. First, green bonds can be a strategic safe-haven avenue for investors in stocks, dirty energy stocks, and the foreign exchange market in the US and China in extreme market downturns. Second, green bonds demonstrated hedging properties against spillovers from Bitcoin, forex, soft commodities, and CO₂ emission allowance. Third, the role of green bonds in the markets of natural gas, industrial metals, and crude oil is limited to a portfolio diversifier in different investment horizons. Fourth, green bonds had no diversification or hedge benefits for investors in conventional bonds. Fifth, the interrelationships between green bonds and most markets’ understudy were influenced by macroeconomic and global factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, economic policy uncertainty, OVX, and VIX. Our review of the literature also facilitated identification of future research topics. The outcome of the review offers insightful information to investors in green bonds in risk management and assets allocation. Policy makers can benefit from this review in effective policy legislation for the advancement of the green bonds market and acceleration of a smooth transition to a net zero emission economy. Full article

In this study the cross-correlations between the cryptocurrency market represented by the two most liquid and highest-capitalized cryptocurrencies: bitcoin and ethereum, on the one side, and the instruments representing the traditional financial markets: stock indices, Forex, commodities, on the other side, are measured in the period: January 2020–October 2022. Our purpose is to address the question whether the cryptocurrency market still preserves its autonomy with respect to the traditional financial markets or it has already aligned with them in expense of its independence. We are motivated by the fact that some previous related studies gave mixed results. By calculating the q-dependent detrended cross-correlation coefficient based on the high frequency 10 s data in the rolling window, the dependence on various time scales, different fluctuation magnitudes, and different market periods are examined. There is a strong indication that the dynamics of the bitcoin and ethereum price changes since the March 2020 COVID-19 panic is no longer independent. Instead, it is related to the dynamics of the traditional financial markets, which is especially evident now in 2022, when the bitcoin and ethereum coupling to the US tech stocks is observed during the market bear phase. It is also worth emphasizing that the cryptocurrencies have begun to react to the economic data such as the Consumer Price Index readings in a similar way as traditional instruments. Such a spontaneous coupling of the so far independent degrees of freedom can be interpreted as a kind of phase transition that resembles the collective phenomena typical for the complex systems. Our results indicate that the cryptocurrencies cannot be considered as a safe haven for the financial investments. Full article

This article investigates the dynamical complexity and fractal characteristics changes of the Bitcoin/US dollar (BTC/USD) and Euro/US dollar (EUR/USD) returns in the period before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, we applied the asymmetric multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (A-MF-DFA) method to investigate the temporal evolution of the asymmetric multifractal spectrum parameters. In addition, we examined the temporal evolution of Fuzzy entropy, non-extensive Tsallis entropy, Shannon entropy, and Fisher information. Our research was motivated to contribute to the comprehension of the pandemic’s impact and the possible changes it caused in two currencies that play a key role in the modern financial system. Our results revealed that for the overall trend both before and after the outbreak of the pandemic, the BTC/USD returns exhibited persistent behavior while the EUR/USD returns exhibited anti-persistent behavior. Additionally, after the outbreak of COVID-19, there was an increase in the degree of multifractality, a dominance of large fluctuations, as well as a sharp decrease of the complexity (i.e., increase of the order and information content and decrease of randomness) of both BTC/USD and EUR/USD returns. The World Health Organization ($WHO$) announcement, in which COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, appears to have had a significant impact on the sudden change in complexity. Our findings can help both investors and risk managers, as well as policymakers, to formulate a comprehensive response to the occurrence of such external events. Full article

In this paper, we analyse two interesting applications related to the dynamics of economic phenomena linked to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), informative surprises, and the Model-Data Paradox of Chaos in certain top currency pairs from the foreign exchange market (FOREX). On the one hand, we empirically show that the FOREX market reacts under the Efficient Market Hypothesis in some cases, creating a significant variation in a short period of time (15, 30, and 60 min) in the quotes of the main currencies from the most important economic regions in the West (the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom). This variation would depend on the actual deviation of high-impact macroeconomic news reported by these markets in relation to trade balance, unemployment rate, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), retail sales, the Industrial Production Index (IPI), and the Consumer Price Index (CPI). On the other hand, by testing the Model-Data Paradox of Chaos, we empirically verify that if we consider all the information available in the financial markets of currencies (or at least, more desegregated data) instead of daily data, and we apply a robust chaotic behaviour detection method, we can find differences in relation to the detection of chaos on the same series but with different temporal frequencies. This allows us to confirm that behind these financial time series which show an apparently random irregular evolution, there would be a generating system which, although unknown in principle, would be deterministic (and nonlinear), and we could take advantage of that deterministic character to make predictions, even if only in the short term, understanding “short term” as the time it takes for the market to incorporate these informative surprises in the FOREX market analysed. Full article

In the current complex financial world, paper currencies are vulnerable and unsustainable due to many factors such as current account deficit, gold reserves, dollar reserves, political stability, security, the presence of war in the region, etc. The vulnerabilities not limited to the above, result in fluctuation and instability in the currency values. Considering the devaluation of some Asian countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Türkiye, and Ukraine, there is a current tendency of some countries to look beyond the SWIFT system. It is not feasible to have reserves in only one currency, and thus, forex markets are likely to have significant growth in their volumes. In this research, we consider this challenge to work on having sustainable forex reserves in multiple world currencies. This research is aimed to overcome their vulnerabilities and, instead, exploit their volatile nature to attain sustainability in forex reserves. In this regard, we work to formulate this problem and propose a forex investment strategy inspired by gradient ascent optimization, a robust iterative optimization algorithm. The dynamic nature of the forex market led us to the formulation and development of the instantaneous stochastic gradient ascent method. Contrary to the conventional gradient ascent optimization, which considers the whole population or its sample, the proposed instantaneous stochastic gradient ascent (ISGA) optimization considers only the next time instance to update the investment strategy. We employed the proposed forex investment strategy on forex data containing one-year multiple currencies’ values, and the results are quite profitable as compared to the conventional investment strategies. Full article

Finances represent one of the key requirements to perform any useful activity for humanity. Financial markets, e.g., stock markets, forex, and mercantile exchanges, etc., provide the opportunity to anyone to invest and generate finances. However, to reap maximum benefits from these financial markets, effective decision making is required to identify the trade directions, e.g., going long/short by analyzing all the influential factors, e.g., price action, economic policies, and supply/demand estimation, in a timely manner. In this regard, analysis of the financial news and Twitter posts plays a significant role to predict the future behavior of financial markets, public sentiment estimation, and systematic/idiosyncratic risk estimation. In this paper, our proposed work aims to analyze the Twitter posts and Google Finance data to predict the future behavior of the stock markets (one of the key financial markets) in a particular time frame, i.e., hourly, daily, weekly, etc., through a novel StockSentiWordNet (SSWN) model. The proposed SSWN model extends the standard opinion lexicon named SentiWordNet (SWN) through the terms specifically related to the stock markets to train extreme learning machine (ELM) and recurrent neural network (RNN) for stock price prediction. The experiments are performed on two datasets, i.e., Sentiment140 and Twitter datasets, and achieved the accuracy value of 86.06%. Findings show that our work outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with respect to overall accuracy. In future, we plan to enhance the capability of our method by adding other popular social media, e.g., Facebook and Google News etc. Full article

In the Forex market, trend trading, where trend traders identify trends and attempt to capture gains through the analysis of an asset’s momentum in a particular direction, is a great way to profit from market movement. When the price of currency is moving in one either of the direction such as; up or down, it is known as trends. This trend analysis helps traders and investors find low risk entry points or exit points until the trend reverses. In this paper, empirical trade and trend analysis results are suggested by two-phase experimentations. First, considering the blended learning paradigm and wide use of deep-learning methodologies, the variants of long-short-term-memory (LSTM) networks such as Vanilla-LSTM, Stacked-LSTM, Bidirectional-LSTM, CNN-LSTM, and Conv-LSTM are used to build effective investing trading systems for both short-term and long-term timeframes. Then, a deep network-based system used to obtain the trends (up trends and down trends) of the predicted closing price of the currency pairs is proposed based on the best fit predictive networks measured using a few performance measures and Friedman’s non-parametric tests. The observed trends are compared and validated with a few readily available technical indicators such as average directional index (ADX), rate of change (ROC), momentum, commodity channel index (CCI), and moving average convergence divergence (MACD). The predictive ability of the proposed strategy for trend analysis can be summarized as follows: (a) with respect to the previous day for short-term predictions, AUD:INR achieves 99.7265% and GBP:INR achieves 99.6582% for long-term predictions; (b) considering the trend analysis strategy with respect to the determinant day, AUD:INR achieves 98.2906% for short-term predictive days and USD:INR achieves an accuracy of trend forecasting with 96.0342%. The significant outcome of this article is the proposed trend forecasting methodology. An attempt has been made to provide an environment to understand the average, maximum, and minimum unit up and/or downs observed during trend forecasting. In turn, this deep learning-based strategy will help investors and traders to comprehend the entry and exit points of this financial market. Full article

News dissemination in social media causes fluctuations in financial markets. (Scope) Recent advanced methods in deep learning-based natural language processing have shown promising results in financial market analysis. However, understanding how to leverage large amounts of textual data alongside financial market information is important for the investors’ behavior analysis. In this study, we review over 150 publications in the field of behavioral finance that jointly investigated natural language processing (NLP) approaches and a market data analysis for financial decision support. This work differs from other reviews by focusing on applied publications in computer science and artificial intelligence that contributed to a heterogeneous information fusion for the investors’ behavior analysis. (Goal) We study various text representation methods, sentiment analysis, and information retrieval methods from heterogeneous data sources. (Findings) We present current and future research directions in text mining and deep learning for correlation analysis, forecasting, and recommendation systems in financial markets, such as stocks, cryptocurrencies, and Forex (Foreign Exchange Market). Full article

The objective of this study is to examine, over the last 20 years, the short-run and long-run effect on global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions of the stock returns, exchange rates and consumer confidence. Stock markets contribute to environmental degradation; as a result, we employed, for the first time, Dow Jones Sustainability World Index to use stock returns of socially responsible companies. The euro to US dollar exchange rate is used, as the forex market is the largest financial market and considers it as the largest major pair. The Consumer Sentiment Index is used as a proxy to consumer confidence, since consumer behavior is, also, considered as a major factor linked to environmental degradation. The basic testing procedures employed include the Augmented Dickey–Fuller stationarity test, cointegration analysis and Vector Error Correction Model (VECM). The results establish that stock returns of companies listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index exert a significant negative (positive) impact on the global CO₂ emissions in the short (long) term. The inverse, i.e., a significant positive (negative) impact on the short (long) run holds for the both other variables, i.e., US consumers’ confidence and euro to US dollar exchange rates. From the outcomes obtained, policy initiatives that could assist companies to mitigate environmental degradation are recommended. Full article