ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the safe haven attributes of gold under extreme market conditions. Our main goal is to understand if this property still holds under exceptional times characterized by unusual high levels of uncertainty. To this end, we gathered data from 2018 to 2023 for a group of emerging markets – the CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) – thus encompassing a stable and a particularly turbulent period, which was marked by two consecutive crises: the COVID-19 and the Russian-Ukrainian war. We chose these countries as they are fast growing economies, which represent important investing opportunities, and because among the emerging markets these are the least studied. To achieve our goal we employed the Multifractal Detrended Cross-Correlation Analysis (MF-DCCA). Our results showed that before the pandemic the cross-correlations between gold and the financial markets were mainly negative. However, with the onset of the crisis they became positive. This demonstrates that gold lost its popular safe haven attributes and highlights the need for investors to seek alternative investments to protect downward risk, especially under extremely turbulent scenarios.
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the impact of COVID-19 on financial markets. It focuses on the evolution of the market efficiency, using two efficiency indicators: the Hurst exponent and the memory parameter of a fractional Lévy-stable motion. The second approach combines, in the same model of dynamic, an alpha-stable distribution and a dependence structure between price returns. We provide a dynamic estimation method for the two efficiency indicators. This method introduces a free parameter, the discount factor, which we select so as to get the best alpha-stable density forecasts for observed price returns. The application to stock indices during the COVID-19 crisis shows a strong loss of efficiency for US indices. On the opposite, Asian and Australian indices seem less affected and the inefficiency of these markets during the COVID-19 crisis is even questionable. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.
ABSTRACT
This study evaluates the Brazilian agricultural commodities market and the dollar-real exchange price variation using the multifractal detrended fluctuations analysis methodology. We investigated the period from January 1, 2019 to September 25, 2019, outside the COVID-19 pandemic, and from January 1, 2020 to September 25, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We verified the fluctuations of commodities and dollar-real exchange prices during the pandemic caused by COVID-19 showed a record price. The results of Hurst exponent and multifractal parameters α0, w, and r indicate that during the COVID-19 pandemic, sugar was the most efficient commodity, while pork the less one. Compared to the identical months in 2019, the dollar-real exchange was the most efficient market, while ethanol was the least efficient. © 2022 World Scientific Publishing Company.