Investigating the impact of Covid-19 on stock markets

This paper aims to examine the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on stock markets. This paper also analyses the stock market cointegration of selected global equity indices that performed better and have a quick speed of recovery during the pandemic. This paper also questions how increasing uncertainty and volatility deters investors’ perception of the diversification of equity investments. The dataset for the selected 12 global equity indices has been used from Thompson Reuters’s EIKON database in a given period of time between 2010 and 2021. This paper employs Vector Error Correction Models to assess the relationship among the selected global equity indices. Findings demonstrate that (i) there is an adverse impact of Covid-19 on the Global Equity markets, (ii) there is a clear sign of cointegration in global equity indices, (ii) investors can benefit from investing in particular equity indices that have exhibited quick speed of recovery from the pandemic records lows. The findings finally provide a strong foundation for constructing a resilient equity portfolio in a highly uncertain market environment.

DYNAMIC PROBABILISTIC FORECASTING WITH UNCERTAINTY

In this paper, we introduce a dynamical model for the time evolution of probability density functions incorporating uncertainty in the parameters. The uncertainty follows stochastic processes, thereby defining a new class of stochastic processes with values in the space of probability densities. The purpose is to quantify uncertainty that can be used for probabilistic forecasting. Starting from a set of traded prices of equity indices, we do some empirical studies. We apply our dynamic probabilistic forecasting to option pricing, where our proposed notion of model uncertainty reduces to uncertainty on future volatility. A distribution of option prices follows, reflecting the uncertainty on the distribution of the underlying prices. We associate measures of model uncertainty of prices in the sense of Cont.

Equity Market Description under High and Low Volatility Regimes Using Maximum Entropy Pairwise Distribution

The financial market is a complex system in which the assets influence each other, causing, among other factors, price interactions and co-movement of returns. Using the Maximum Entropy Principle approach, we analyze the interactions between a selected set of stock assets and equity indices under different high and low return volatility episodes at the 2008 Subprime Crisis and the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak. We carry out an inference process to identify the interactions, in which we implement the a pairwise Ising distribution model describing the first and second moments of the distribution of the discretized returns of each asset. Our results indicate that second-order interactions explain more than 80% of the entropy in the system during the Subprime Crisis and slightly higher than 50% during the Covid-19 outbreak independently of the period of high or low volatility analyzed. The evidence shows that during these periods, slight changes in the second-order interactions are enough to induce large changes in assets correlations but the proportion of positive and negative interactions remains virtually unchanged. Although some interactions change signs, the proportion of these changes are the same period to period, which keeps the system in a ferromagnetic state. These results are similar even when analyzing triadic structures in the signed network of couplings.

COVID-19 as Information Transmitter to Global Equity Markets: Evidence from CEEMDAN-Based Transfer Entropy Approach

This study provides an analysis of chaotic information transmission from the COVID-19 pandemic to global equity markets in a novel denoised frequency domain entropy framework. The current length of the pandemic data offers the opportunity to examine its role in the asymmetric behaviour patterns of investors according to time horizons and the diversification potentials available to them. We employ the total daily global confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 27 equity indices from December 31, 2019, to April 18, 2021. Our results corroborate the idea that diversification potentials are stronger in the short to medium term. The Global Index (higher risk) and Canada and New Zealand (lower risk) remain at both ends to pair some other equities to offer diversification prospects because of the transmission of information from COVID-19 to the selected equity markets. In addition, we provide the source of these diversification prospects as information flow rather than transmission of shocks, which is common in the literature. Furthermore, our results suggest detailed levels of risk (lower vis-à-vis higher) in the situation where they have been stripped of the noise in the market. The findings allow both investors and policymakers to make informed decisions based on the time horizons since the pandemic communicates different chaotic information with the lapse of time. This is imperative to avoid the negative consequences of the increasing infection rate on global stock markets.

Selection of the right proxy market portfolio for CAPM

The purpose of the paper is to select the right market proxy for calculating the expected return, since critically evaluating proxies or selecting the correct proxy market portfolio is essential for portfolio management because the change in the market portfolio proxy affects returns. In this study, monthly data of equity indices are evaluated to find out the better market proxy. The indices taken are BSE 30 (Sensex), Nifty 50, BSE 100, BSE 200, and BSE 500. The macroeconomic variables used in the study are industrial production index (IIP), consumer price index (CPI), money supply (M1), and exchange rate in India. To avoid the influence of COVID-19, the research period was from January 2013 to December 2019 to critically evaluate these proxies in order to find the most appropriate market proxy. This paper reveals a noteworthy relationship between stock market returns and macroeconomic factors, while suggesting that the BSE 500 is a better choice for all equity indices, as the index also shows a significant relationship with all macroeconomic variables. BSE500 is a composite index comprising all sectors with low, mid and large cap securities, therefore it reflects the impact of macroeconomic factors most efficiently, taking it as a market proxy. This study was carried out in the context of India and can be replicated for other countries.

Spillovers from tourism demand to tourism equity indices

In this article, we analyse the extent of the spillover from international tourism demand on tourism sector equity indices and find that the magnitude of the spillovers are quite dispersed across different markets, which is in line with previous studies. Novel to the literature, we examine the impact of solvency and profitability positions of the firms in the tourism equity indices on evaluating the magnitude of the spillovers from tourism demand to sector equity indices. Firms that have better solvency ratios and operated in deeper financial markets find their stock returns are affected less from the fluctuations in tourism demand. Profitability positions of the firms, however, do not have significant impact on explaining the spillovers.

Bitcoin and stock markets: a revisit of relationship

The volatility of bitcoin (BTC) and time horizon is the center point for investment decisions. However, attention is not often drawn to the relationship between BTC and equity indices. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the volatility and time frequency domain of BTC with stock markets.

The reaction of Asian-Pacific investment company returns to U.S. equity returns

This study is relevant to investors who wish to diversify their investment portfolio by investing in U.S.-based investment companies that invest in specific Pacific Basin countries to better understand the diversification benefits of such investments. The purpose is to examine the daily returns of selected U.S.-based, country-focused (Pacific Basin) investment companies to see if those returns accurately reflect the changes of the equity indices of the corresponding Pacific Basin market on the following trading day. The method used is that the reactions of daily investment company returns compared to U.S. market daily returns are examined for Japan, South Korea, and Australia for the period 2006–2010. These return reactions are compared to the home-country returns. Next, for the period from 2011 to 2015, the examination is broadened to include U.S.-based investment companies that invest in Taiwan, Singapore, China, and Indonesia. The results show that investment company share prices on “day t” tend to overreact to changes in the S&P 500 on “day t”, relative to “day t+1” changes in the corresponding Pacific Basin market index – often by more than 100%. Finally, the study shows that on “day t+1” these investment company share prices exhibit a reversal. These findings indicate that the diversification benefits of investing in these Pacific Basin investment companies are reduced due to this increased volatility. S&P 500 returns are accompanied by significantly larger returns on the Pacific Basin investment company shares than are actually realized in the home country on the following day, suggesting that the diversification benefits are not being fully realized.