A Social Network Analysis–based approach to investigate user behaviour during a cryptocurrency speculative bubble

In this article, we present a Social Network Analysis–based approach to investigate user behaviour during a cryptocurrency speculative bubble in order to extract knowledge patterns about it. Our approach is general and can be applied to any past, present and future cryptocurrency speculative bubble. To verify its potential, we apply it to investigate the Ethereum speculative bubble happened in the years 2017 and 2018. We also describe several interesting knowledge patterns about the behaviour of specific categories of users that we obtained from this investigation. Furthermore, we describe how our approach can support the construction of an identikit of the speculators who maneuvered behind the Ethereum bubble analysed. Finally, we show that this capability of supporting the hunting for speculators is intrinsic of our approach and can cover past, present and future bubbles.

Diagnosis and Prediction of IIGPS’ Countries Bubble Crashes during BREXIT

We herein employ an alternative approach to model the financial bubbles prior to crashes and fit a log-periodic power law (LPPL) to IIGPS countries (Italy, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain) during Brexit. These countries represent the five financially troubled economies of the Eurozone that have suffered the most during the Brexit referendum. It was found that all 77 crashes across the five IIGPS nations from 19 January 2015 until 17 February 2020 strictly followed a log-periodic power law or other LPPL signature. They all had a speculative bubble phase (following the power law growth) that was then followed by a sudden crash immediately after reaching a critical point. Furthermore, their pattern coefficients were similar as well. This study would surely assist policymakers around the Eurozone to predict future crashes with the help of these parameters.

Comedy and Crisis

Comedy and Crisis features the first ever scholarly English translation of two plays by the eighteenth-century Dutch playwright Pieter Langendijk: Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders [Quincampoix of de Windhandelaars], and Harlequin Stock-Jobber [Arlequin Actionist]. Both plays were occasioned by the financial speculation in England, France, and the Netherlands in 1719-20. In the Netherlands the speculative activity was referred to as a windhandel or wind trade. The first play is a full-length satirical comedy, and the second is a short, comic harlequinade; both were performed in Amsterdam in the fall of 1720, as the speculative bubble in the Netherlands was bursting. Comedy and Crisis also contains a translation of the extensive apparatus (introduction and notes) prepared by the scholar C.H.P. Meijer for his 1892 edition of these plays. The current editors have updated the footnotes and added six new critical essays by contemporary literary and historical scholars that contextualize the two plays historically and culturally. The book includes an extensive bibliography and index. The materials assembled in Comedy and Crisis are a rich resource for cultural, historical, and literary students of the history of finance and of eighteenth-century studies.

Does Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting Lead to Less Speculative Trading?

I compare speculative bubble formation between a group of corporations in the S&P 500 that score high on corporate social responsibility versus the S&P 500 as a whole. I find that a portfolio of highly ranked CSR firms have a smaller sample likelihood of exhibit speculative bubbles.

THE MINSKY MOMENT AS THE REVENGE OF ENTROPY

Considering macroeconomies as systems subject to stochastic forms of entropic equilibria, we shall consider how deviations driven by positive feedbacks as in a speculative bubble can drive such an economy into an anti-entropic state that can suddenly collapse back into an entropic state, with such a collapse taking the form of a Minsky moment. This can manifest itself as shifts in the boundary between the portion of the income distribution that is best modeled as Boltzmann–Gibbs and that best modeled as a Paretian power law.