Review of top five financial markets during the pandemic times

The purpose of this paper is to jot down the devastating impacts of COVID-19 towards the top five financial markets of the world and to see how they reacted back in different phases of COVID-19 from start till July 2020. The review is based on the financial market news, blogs, the governmental, and other financial bodies’ websites. The effects of the pandemic are like the damage never seen before in a much shorter time, vanishing a quarter portion of wealth in about a month and creating continuous uncertainties for investors throughout. China despite being the virus origin still performed well and better among all top markets whereas the rest all the stock exchanges remained inconsistent. This paper is the first of its kind to review the COVID-19 effects on the top five global stock markets and the governmental responses towards them. The study along with contributing to the existing literature is also assisting investors, analysts, specialists, and authorities to analyze their opinions w.r.t. stock markets performances, government responses, and their future market-related decisions.

Sentiment correlation in financial news networks and associated market movements

In an increasingly connected global market, news sentiment towards one company may not only indicate its own market performance, but can also be associated with a broader movement on the sentiment and performance of other companies from the same or even different sectors. In this paper, we apply NLP techniques to understand news sentiment of 87 companies among the most reported on Reuters for a period of 7 years. We investigate the propagation of such sentiment in company networks and evaluate the associated market movements in terms of stock price and volatility. Our results suggest that, in certain sectors, strong media sentiment towards one company may indicate a significant change in media sentiment towards related companies measured as neighbours in a financial network constructed from news co-occurrence. Furthermore, there exists a weak but statistically significant association between strong media sentiment and abnormal market return as well as volatility. Such an association is more significant at the level of individual companies, but nevertheless remains visible at the level of sectors or groups of companies.