Bitcoin Price Risk—A Durations Perspective

An important aspect of liquidity is price risk, i.e., the risk that a small transaction leads to a large price change. This usually happens in a thin market, when trading opportunities are scarce and the time between subsequent trades is long. We rely on an autoregressive conditional duration model to extract the probability of a substantial price event in a particular time interval and, thus, an intraday risk profile. Our findings show that price risk is highest at times when European and U.S. investors do not trade. In a second step, we relate daily aggregates to characteristics of the Bitcoin blockchain and investigate whether investors account for features like confirmation time or fees when timing their orders.