IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolet/v205y2021ics0165176521002196.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Bitcoin: Bubble that bursts or Gold that glitters?

Author

Listed:
  • Caferra, Rocco
  • Tedeschi, Gabriele
  • Morone, Andrea

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on the 2017 Bitcoin bubble. Firstly, by applying the dynamic time warping algorithm, we identify among several financial instruments a subsample of five assets with similar characteristics to the cryptocurrency bubble. Interestingly, among the fluctuations characterizing these assets, the algorithm shows a close affinity between the Bitcoin bubble and the 2000 NASDAQ Dotcom one. Once the subsample is identified, we study the (de)synchronization among these assets via the wavelet coherence approach. Although Bitcoin is poorly correlated with the other indices, given its scarce connection with the real economy, we observe switching phenomena among these instruments. A more careful study on these portfolio reallocations, conducted via an event study analysis, reveals that traders seem to redirect capital from stock markets and gold to Bitcoin in case of positive events of the cryptocurrency.

Suggested Citation

  • Caferra, Rocco & Tedeschi, Gabriele & Morone, Andrea, 2021. "Bitcoin: Bubble that bursts or Gold that glitters?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 205(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:205:y:2021:i:c:s0165176521002196
    DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109942
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176521002196
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109942?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dirk G. Baur & Brian M. Lucey, 2010. "Is Gold a Hedge or a Safe Haven? An Analysis of Stocks, Bonds and Gold," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 45(2), pages 217-229, May.
    2. Peter C. B. Phillips & Yangru Wu & Jun Yu, 2011. "EXPLOSIVE BEHAVIOR IN THE 1990s NASDAQ: WHEN DID EXUBERANCE ESCALATE ASSET VALUES?," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 52(1), pages 201-226, February.
    3. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 2015. "A five-factor asset pricing model," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(1), pages 1-22.
    4. Fatum, Rasmus & Yamamoto, Yohei, 2016. "Intra-safe haven currency behavior during the global financial crisis," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 49-64.
    5. Baur, Dirk G. & McDermott, Thomas K., 2010. "Is gold a safe haven? International evidence," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(8), pages 1886-1898, August.
    6. C. Baek & M. Elbeck, 2015. "Bitcoins as an investment or speculative vehicle? A first look," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(1), pages 30-34, January.
    7. Urquhart, Andrew, 2018. "What causes the attention of Bitcoin?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 40-44.
    8. Gandal, Neil & Hamrick, JT & Moore, Tyler & Oberman, Tali, 2018. "Price manipulation in the Bitcoin ecosystem," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 86-96.
    9. Bera, Anil K & Higgins, Matthew L, 1993. "ARCH Models: Properties, Estimation and Testing," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 7(4), pages 305-366, December.
    10. Vidal-Tomás, David & Ibañez, Ana, 2018. "Semi-strong efficiency of Bitcoin," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 27(C), pages 259-265.
    11. John M. Griffin & Jeffrey H. Harris & Tao Shu & Selim Topaloglu, 2011. "Who Drove and Burst the Tech Bubble?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(4), pages 1251-1290, August.
    12. Dodd, Nigel, 2018. "The social life of Bitcoin," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 69229, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    13. Bredin, Don & Conlon, Thomas & Potì, Valerio, 2015. "Does gold glitter in the long-run? Gold as a hedge and safe haven across time and investment horizon," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 320-328.
    14. Bouri, Elie & Molnár, Peter & Azzi, Georges & Roubaud, David & Hagfors, Lars Ivar, 2017. "On the hedge and safe haven properties of Bitcoin: Is it really more than a diversifier?," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 20(C), pages 192-198.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zhong, Yufei & Chen, Xuesheng & Wang, Chengfang & Wang, Zhixian & Zhang, Yuchen, 2023. "The hedging performance of green bond markets in China and the U.S.: Novel evidence from cryptocurrency uncertainty," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 128(C).
    2. Kyriazis, Nikolaos & Papadamou, Stephanos & Tzeremes, Panayiotis & Corbet, Shaen, 2023. "Can cryptocurrencies provide a viable hedging mechanism for benchmark index investors?," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    3. Almeida, José & Gonçalves, Tiago Cruz, 2023. "A systematic literature review of investor behavior in the cryptocurrency markets," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(C).
    4. Cascavilla, Alessandro, 2023. "Between money and speculative asset: the role of financial literacy on the perception towards Bitcoin in Italy," MPRA Paper 118472, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Cascavilla, Alessandro, 2024. "Between money and speculative asset: The role of financial literacy on the perception towards Bitcoin in Italy," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Flori, Andrea, 2019. "News and subjective beliefs: A Bayesian approach to Bitcoin investments," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 336-356.
    2. Urquhart, Andrew & Zhang, Hanxiong, 2019. "Is Bitcoin a hedge or safe haven for currencies? An intraday analysis," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 49-57.
    3. Corbet, Shaen & Lucey, Brian & Urquhart, Andrew & Yarovaya, Larisa, 2019. "Cryptocurrencies as a financial asset: A systematic analysis," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 182-199.
    4. Aurelio F. Bariviera & Ignasi Merediz‐Solà, 2021. "Where Do We Stand In Cryptocurrencies Economic Research? A Survey Based On Hybrid Analysis," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 377-407, April.
    5. Ahmed, Walid M.A., 2021. "Stock market reactions to upside and downside volatility of Bitcoin: A quantile analysis," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 57(C).
    6. Lennart Ante, 2020. "A place next to Satoshi: foundations of blockchain and cryptocurrency research in business and economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1305-1333, August.
    7. Kang, Sang Hoon & McIver, Ron P. & Hernandez, Jose Arreola, 2019. "Co-movements between Bitcoin and Gold: A wavelet coherence analysis," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 536(C).
    8. Shahzad, Syed Jawad Hussain & Balli, Faruk & Naeem, Muhammad Abubakr & Hasan, Mudassar & Arif, Muhammad, 2022. "Do conventional currencies hedge cryptocurrencies?," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 85(C), pages 223-228.
    9. Wang, Pengfei & Zhang, Wei & Li, Xiao & Shen, Dehua, 2019. "Is cryptocurrency a hedge or a safe haven for international indices? A comprehensive and dynamic perspective," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 1-18.
    10. Chung Baek & Thomas Jackman, 2021. "Safe-haven assets for U.S. equities during the 2020 COVID-19 bear market," Economics and Business Letters, Oviedo University Press, vol. 10(3), pages 331-335.
    11. Rehman, Mobeen Ur, 2020. "Do bitcoin and precious metals do any good together? An extreme dependence and risk spillover analysis," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    12. Dimitrios Koutmos & Timothy King & Constantin Zopounidis, 2021. "Hedging uncertainty with cryptocurrencies: Is bitcoin your best bet?," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 44(4), pages 815-837, December.
    13. Panagiotidis, Theodore & Stengos, Thanasis & Vravosinos, Orestis, 2019. "The effects of markets, uncertainty and search intensity on bitcoin returns," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 220-242.
    14. Brajaballav Kar & Chandrabhanu Das, 2022. "Cryptocurrency Response to COVID-19: A Test of Efficient Market Hypothesis," Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, in: Rabi Narayan Subudhi & Sumita Mishra & Abu Saleh & Dariush Khezrimotlagh (ed.), Future of Work and Business in Covid-19 Era, pages 9-18, Springer.
    15. Smales, L.A., 2019. "Bitcoin as a safe haven: Is it even worth considering?," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 385-393.
    16. Conlon, Thomas & Corbet, Shaen & McGee, Richard J., 2020. "Are cryptocurrencies a safe haven for equity markets? An international perspective from the COVID-19 pandemic," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    17. Choi, Sangyup & Shin, Junhyeok, 2022. "Bitcoin: An inflation hedge but not a safe haven," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 46(PB).
    18. Ángeles Cebrián-Hernández & Enrique Jiménez-Rodríguez, 2021. "Modeling of the Bitcoin Volatility through Key Financial Environment Variables: An Application of Conditional Correlation MGARCH Models," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(3), pages 1-16, January.
    19. Andreas Hackethal & Tobin Hanspal & Dominique M Lammer & Kevin Rink, 2022. "The Characteristics and Portfolio Behavior of Bitcoin Investors: Evidence from Indirect Cryptocurrency Investments [The investor in structured retail products: advice driven or gambling oriented]," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 26(4), pages 855-898.
    20. Zhou, Siwen, 2018. "Exploring the Driving Forces of the Bitcoin Exchange Rate Dynamics: An EGARCH Approach," MPRA Paper 89445, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cryptocurrencies; Bubbles; Assets synchronization; Hedging;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C58 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Financial Econometrics
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:205:y:2021:i:c:s0165176521002196. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolet .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.