Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009, the dramatic and unsteady evolution of the cryptocurrency market has also been driven by large investments by traditional and cryptocurrency-focused hedge funds. Notwithstanding their critical role, our understanding of the relationship between institutional investments and the evolution of the cryptocurrency market has remained limited, also due to the lack of comprehensive data describing investments over time. In this study, we present a quantitative study of cryptocurrency institutional investments based on a dataset collected for 1324 currencies in the period between 2014 and 2022 from Crunchbase, one of the largest platforms gathering business information. We show that the evolution of the cryptocurrency market capitalization is highly correlated with the size of institutional investments, thus confirming their important role. Further, we find that the market is dominated by the presence of a group of prominent investors who tend to specialise by focusing on particular technologies. Finally, studying the co-investment network of currencies that share common investors, we show that assets with shared investors tend to be characterized by similar market behavior. Our work sheds light on the role played by institutional investors and provides a basis for further research on their influence in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial market efficiency of price returns, absolute returns, and volatility increment: Evidence from stock and cryptocurrency markets
In this paper we extend the known methodology for fitting stable distributions to the multivariate case and apply the suggested method to the modelling of daily cryptocurrency-return data. The investigated time period is cut into 10 non-overlapping sections, thus the changes can also be observed. We apply bootstrap tests for checking the models and compare our approach to the more traditional extreme-value and copula models.
This paper is the first of a series of short articles that explore the efficiency of major cryptocurrency markets. A number of statistical tests and properties of statistical distributions will be used to assess if cryptocurrency markets are efficient, and how their efficiency changes over time. In this paper, we analyze autocorrelation of returns in major cryptocurrency markets using the following methods: Pearson's autocorrelation coefficient of different orders, Ljung-Box test, and first-order Pearson's autocorrelation coefficient in a rolling window. All experiments are conducted on the BT…
This study attempts to analyze patterns in cryptocurrency markets using a special type of deep neural networks, namely a convolutional autoencoder. The method extracts the dominant features of market behavior and classifies the 40 studied cryptocurrencies into several classes for twelve 6-month periods starting from 15th May 2013. Transitions from one class to another with time are related to the maturement of cryptocurrencies. In speculative cryptocurrency markets, these findings have potential implications for investment and trading strategies.
Anticipating price developments in financial markets is a topic of continued interest in forecasting. Funneled by advancements in deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) together with the availability of vast amounts of textual data in form of news articles, social media postings, etc., an increasing number of studies incorporate text-based predictors in forecasting models. We contribute to this literature by introducing weak learning, a recently proposed NLP approach to address the problem that text data is unlabeled. Without a dependent variable, it is not possible to finetune pr…
Cryptocurrencies are considered the latest innovation in finance with considerable impact across social, technological, and economic dimensions. This new class of financial assets has also motivated a myriad of scientific investigations focused on understanding their statistical properties, such as the distribution of price returns. However, research so far has only considered Bitcoin or at most a few cryptocurrencies, whilst ignoring that price returns might depend on cryptocurrency age or be influenced by market capitalization. Here, we therefore present a comprehensive investigation of larg…
Cryptocurrency markets have many of the characteristics of 20th century commodities markets, making them an attractive candidate for trend following strategies. We present a decade of evidence from the infancy of bitcoin, showcasing the potential investor returns in cryptocurrency trend following, 255% walkforward annualised returns. We find that cryptocurrencies offer similar returns characteristics to commodities with similar risk-adjusted returns, and strong bear market diversification against traditional equities. Code available at https://github.com/Globe-Research/bittrends.
Northeastern University（东北大学）；The University of Ballarat（巴拉瑞特大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学）
In addition to being familiar with policies, high investment returns also require extensive knowledge of relevant industry knowledge and news. In addition, it is necessary to leverage relevant theories for investment to make decisions, thereby amplifying investment returns. A effective investment return estimate can feedback the future rate of return of investment behavior. In recent years, deep learning are developing rapidly, and investment return prediction based on deep learning has become an emerging research topic. This paper proposes an embedding-based dual branch approach to predict an…
This paper introduces new methods to study behaviours among the 52 largest cryptocurrencies between 01-01-2019 and 30-06-2021. First, we explore evolutionary correlation behaviours and apply a recently proposed turning point algorithm to identify regimes in market correlation. Next, we inspect the relationship between collective dynamics and the cryptocurrency market size - revealing an inverse relationship between the size of the market and the strength of collective dynamics. We then explore the time-varying consistency of the relationships between cryptocurrencies' size and their returns an…
The inverse statistics is the distribution of waiting times needed to achieve a predefined level of return obtained from (detrended) historic asset prices \cite{optihori,gainloss}. Such a distribution typically goes through a maximum at a time coined the {\em optimal investment horizon}, $τ^*_ρ$, which defines the most likely waiting time for obtaining a given return $ρ$. By considering equal positive and negative levels of return, we reported in \cite{gainloss} on a quantitative gain/loss asymmetry most pronounced for short horizons. In the present paper, the inverse statistics for 2/3 of the…
The efficient market hypothesis has far-reaching implications for financial trading and market stability. Whether or not cryptocurrencies are informationally efficient has therefore been the subject of intense recent investigation. Here, we use permutation entropy and statistical complexity over sliding time-windows of price log returns to quantify the dynamic efficiency of more than four hundred cryptocurrencies. We consider that a cryptocurrency is efficient within a time-window when these two complexity measures are statistically indistinguishable from their values obtained on randomly shuf…
We test various volatility models using the Bitcoin spot price series. Our models include HIST, EMA ARCH, GARCH, and EGARCH, models. Both of our in-sample-fit and out-of-sample-forecast results suggest that GARCH and EGARCH models perform much better than other models. Moreover, the EGARCH model's asymmetric term is positive and insignificant, which suggests that Bitcoin prices lack the asymmetric volatility response to past returns. Finally, we formulate an option trading strategy by exploiting the volatility spread between the GARCH volatility forecast and the option's implied volatility. We…
In stochastic finance, one traditionally considers the return as a competitive measure of an asset, {\it i.e.}, the profit generated by that asset after some fixed time span $Δt$, say one week or one year. This measures how well (or how bad) the asset performs over that given period of time. It has been established that the distribution of returns exhibits ``fat tails'' indicating that large returns occur more frequently than what is expected from standard Gaussian stochastic processes (Mandelbrot-1967,Stanley1,Doyne). Instead of estimating this ``fat tail'' distribution of returns, we propose…
We analyze four structured products that have caused severe losses to investors in recent years. These products are: return optimization securities, yield magnet notes, reverse exchangeable securities, and principal-protected notes. We describe the basic structure of these products, analyze them probabilistically using the Law of Total Expectation, and assess the practical implications of buying them in the mid-2000s. By estimating expected rates of return under various scenarios, we conclude in each case that buyers were likely to experience grave difficulties from the start. By inspecting va…
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
In the IEEE Investment ranking challenge 2018, participants were asked to build a model which would identify the best performing stocks based on their returns over a forward six months window. Anonymized financial predictors and semi-annual returns were provided for a group of anonymized stocks from 1996 to 2017, which were divided into 42 non-overlapping six months period. The second half of 2017 was used as an out-of-sample test of the model's performance. Metrics used were Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) of the top 20% of a model's pr…
Nomura Asset Management Co.（野村资产管理公司）；New York University（纽约大学）
Stock return predictability is an important research theme as it reflects our economic and social organization, and significant efforts are made to explain the dynamism therein. Statistics of strong explanative power, called "factor" have been proposed to summarize the essence of predictive stock returns. Although machine learning methods are increasingly popular in stock return prediction, an inference of the stock returns is highly elusive, and still most investors, if partly, rely on their intuition to build a better decision making. The challenge here is to make an investment strategy that…
Given a new candidate asset represented as a time series of returns, how should a quantitative investment manager be thinking about assessing its usefulness? This is a key qualitative question inherent to the investment process which we aim to make precise. We argue that the usefulness of an asset can only be determined relative to a reference universe of assets and/or benchmarks the investment manager already has access to or would like to diversify away from, for instance, standard risk factors, common trading styles and other assets. We identify four features that the time series of returns…
Asymmetric relationship between price and volatility is a prominent feature of the financial market time series. This paper explores the price-volatility nexus in cryptocurrency markets and investigates the presence of asymmetric volatility effect between uptrend (bull) and downtrend (bear) regimes. The conventional GARCH-class models have shown that in cryptocurrency markets, asymmetric reactions of volatility to returns differ from those of other traditional financial assets. We address this issue from a viewpoint of fractal analysis, which can cover the nonlinear interactions and the self-s…
Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are the only truly liquid assets related to real estate investments. We study the behavior of U.S. REITs over the past three decades and document their return characteristics. REITs have somewhat less market risk than equity; their betas against a broad market index average about .65. Decomposing their covariances into principal components reveals several strong factors. REIT characteristics differ to some extent from those of the S&P/Case-Shiller (SCS) residential real estate indexes. This is partly attributable to methods of index construction. Our exami…
Designing profitable and reliable trading strategies is challenging in the highly volatile cryptocurrency market. Existing works applied deep reinforcement learning methods and optimistically reported increased profits in backtesting, which may suffer from the false positive issue due to overfitting. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to address backtest overfitting for cryptocurrency trading using deep reinforcement learning. First, we formulate the detection of backtest overfitting as a hypothesis test. Then, we train the DRL agents, estimate the probability of overfitting, and r…
Time series of price returns for 80 of the most liquid cryptocurrencies listed on Binance are investigated for the presence of detrended cross-correlations. A spectral analysis of the detrended correlation matrix and a topological analysis of the minimal spanning trees calculated based on this matrix are applied for different positions of a moving window. The cryptocurrencies become more strongly cross-correlated among themselves than they used to be before. The average cross-correlations increase with time on a specific time scale in a way that resembles the Epps effect amplification when goi…
We investigate logarithmic price returns cross-correlations at different time horizons for a set of 25 liquid cryptocurrencies traded on the FTX digital currency exchange. We study how the structure of the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) and the Triangulated Maximally Filtered Graph (TMFG) evolve from high (15 s) to low (1 day) frequency time resolutions. For each horizon, we test the stability, statistical significance and economic meaningfulness of the networks. Results give a deep insight into the evolutionary process of the time dependent hierarchical organization of the system under analysis.…
Social systems are characterized by an enormous network of connections and factors that can influence the structure and dynamics of these systems. All financial markets, including the cryptocurrency market, belong to the economical sphere of human activity that seems to be the most interrelated and complex. The cryptocurrency market complexity can be studied from different perspectives. First, the dynamics of the cryptocurrency exchange rates to other cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies can be studied and quantified by means of multifractal formalism. Second, coupling and decoupling of the cr…
Risk-only investment strategies have been growing in popularity as traditional in- vestment strategies have fallen short of return targets over the last decade. However, risk-based investors should be aware of four things. First, theoretical considerations and empirical studies show that apparently dictinct risk-based investment strategies are manifestations of a single effect. Second, turnover and associated transaction costs can be a substantial drag on return. Third, capital diversification benefits may be reduced. Fourth, there is an apparent connection between performance and risk diversi…
