0000000000006716
AUTHOR
Klaus Grobys
Another Look at Value and Momentum: Volatility Spillovers
This paper examines volatility interdependencies between value and momentum returns. Using U.S. data over the period 1926-2015, we document persistent periods of low and high volatility spillovers between value and momentum strategies. Moreover, we find that the intensity of the volatility spillovers may change substantially in very short periods of time and that these shifts in spillover intensity can be linked to prominent economic events and financial market turmoil. Our results further demonstrate that value returns increase and momentum returns decrease monotonically with increasing volatility spillovers between the two strategies. Given this linkage between spillover intensity and ret…
Asset Market Equilibria in Cryptocurrency Markets: Evidence from a Study of Privacy and Non-Privacy Coins
This paper explores whether asset market equilibria in cryptocurrency markets exist. In doing so, it distinguishes between privacy and non-privacy coins. Most recently, privacy coins have attracted increasing attention in the public debate as non-privacy cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, do not satisfy some users’ demands for anonymity. Analyzing ten cryptocurrencies with the highest market capitalization in each sub-market in the 2016–2018 period, we find that privacy coins and non-privacy coins exhibit two distinct market equilibria. Contributing to the current debate on the market efficiency of cryptocurrency markets, our findings provide evidence of market inefficiency. Moreover, the a…
When Bitcoin Has the Flu: On Bitcoin’s Performance to Hedge Equity Risk in the Early Wake of the COVID-19 Outbreak
Using the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak as a set-up for a quasi-experiment, this study derives novel insights on the dynamic correlation between Bitcoin and U.S. stocks. Given the unprecedented scale of infections and the nature of the virus, the potential impact on the dynamic correlation was unpredictable and therefore uncertain. Using a difference-in-differences setting, the dynamic correlation between Bitcoin and stocks is controlled for the dynamic correlation between gold and stocks. This study finds that Bitcoin performed poorly in hedging this tail risk.
On the Stability of Stablecoins
This paper investigates the volatility processes of stablecoins and their potential stochastic interdependencies with Bitcoin volatility. We employ a novel approach to choose the optimal combination for the power law exponent and the minimum value for the volatilities bending the power law. Our results indicate that Bitcoin volatility is well-behaved in a statistical sense with a finite theoretical variance. Surprisingly, the volatilities of stablecoins are statistically unstable and contemporaneously respond to Bitcoin volatility. Also, whereas the volatilities of stablecoins are not Granger-causal for Bitcoin volatility, lagged Bitcoin volatility exhibits Granger-causal effects on the vol…
Risk-Managed Industry Momentum and Momentum Crashes
This is the first paper that investigates Barosso and Santa-Clara’s (2015) risk-managed momentum strategy in an industry momentum setting. We investigate traditional momentum strategies and Novy-Marx (2012) strategy. We also explore the impact of different variance forecast horizons on the average payoffs. We find that risk-managed industry momentum payoffs generate considerably higher returns than plain momentum strategies. Notably, risk-managed payoffs increase linearly as the time window for variance forecasts are contracted which is consistent for all different strategies.
Is Momentum in Currency Markets Driven by Global Economic Risk?
This article investigates the potential link between momentum in currency returns and global economic risk as measured by currency return dispersion (RD). We find that the spread on zero-cost currency momentum strategies is larger and highly significant in high RD states compared to low RD states. Also, the relation between these momentum payoffs and global economic risk appears to increase linearly in risk. Further tests indicate that the same macroeconomic risk component in currency markets is present in global equity markets. Based on this evidence, we conclude that global economic risk as proxied by RD helps to explain currency momentum profits.
Finite Sample Sizes of the GRS Test in the Presence of Dynamic Correlation and Conditional Heteroskedasticity
This paper investigates the finite sample properties of the widely-used Gibbons, Ross, Shanken (1989) (GRS) test in the presence of both conditional correlation and conditional heteroskedasticity. It finds that the GRS test exhibits serious size distortions resulting in potentially misleading statistical inferences. The correct critical values, as reported in the study, are considerably larger than suggested by the GRS test.
Are Momentum Crashes Pervasive Regardless of Strategy? Evidence from the Foreign Exchange Market
This paper studies the option-like behavior of popular momentum strategies implemented in foreign exchange markets. The results confirm those of Daniel and Moskowitz (2013) in finding strong option-like behavior for both momentum measures, based on the cumulative return from 12 and 6 months prior to the formation date to one month prior to the formation date. Surprisingly, there is no such evidence for the popular momentum strategy accounting for a one-month formation period.
On survivor stocks in the S&P 500 stock index
This paper investigates the performance and characteristics of survivor stocks in the S&P 500 index. Using both in-sample and out-of-sample comparisons, survivor stocks outperformed this market index by a considerable margin. Relative to other S&P 500 index companies, survivor stocks tend to be small value stocks that exhibit high profitability and invest conservatively. Surprisingly, survivor stocks tend to be loser stocks with negative exposure to the momentum factor. Further analyses show that the volatility of the survivor stocks portfolio is less exposed to tail risks and responds less to shocks in the innovation process.
When the Blockchain Does Not Block: On Hackings and Uncertainty in the Cryptocurrency Market
A total of 1.1 million bitcoin were stolen in the 2013–2017 period. Noting that the average price for Bitcoin in 2018 was USD 7,572 the corresponding monetary equivalent of losses is USD 8.9 billion which strongly shows the societal impact of this criminal activity. Investigating the response of the uncertainty of Bitcoin when hacking incidents occur, the results of this study point toward a delayed response in volatility. The volatility increases significantly only at day t+5. Incidents of hacking that occur in the Bitcoin market affect uncertainty for another cryptocurrency Ethereum too. Again, the evidence suggests a delayed response. However, Bitcoin and Ethereum do not exhibit asymmetr…
Another Look at Momentum Crashes
This paper studies the profitability of a selection of prominent momentum-based strategies in the European Monetary Union. In contrast to past examples documenting the lack of profitability of unconditional price momentum in the most recent decade, the current research finds that unconditional price momentum yielded significant positive payoffs. There is evidence of option-like behavior for strategies based on intermediate past performance. Surprisingly, there is no such evidence for the momentum strategy based on recent past performance .
Fear Sells: Determinants of Fund-Raising Success in the cross-section of Initial Coin Offerings
This paper explores cross-sectionally the determinants of ICO success as measured by the amount of raised funding. Our study is the first that retrieves an intensive hand-collected data library covering the entire population of all 5,033 ICOs launched in the 2014 – 2019 period. Another important novel aspect is that we address the question whether psychological and financial sentiment cached in whitepapers have an impact on the success of ICOs. We employ natural language procession tools and various sentiment dictionaries to assess the sentiment in whitepapers and our results suggest that ICO investors are largely guided by their emotions when making investment decisions. Additionally, to g…
What Do We Know About the Second Moment of Financial Markets?
Recent research shows that the vast majority of scientific studies published in leading finance journals fails scientific replication (Hou, Xue, and Zhang, 2020; Harvey, Liu, and Zhu; 2016). This study argues that p-hacking, publication pressure and the selection bias from leading finance journals are perhaps not the underlying root cause for this issue. We show that standard methodologies often used in finance research are inevitably sample-specific due to the very nature of financial markets. While the consensus of earlier research postulates a rejection of the time-honored Levy hypothesis, our results strongly indicate that the variance of variance does not exist in any of the financial …
Speculation and Lottery-Like Demand in Cryptocurrency Markets
This is the first paper that explores lottery-like demand in cryptocurrency markets. Since recent research provides evidence that cryptocurrency returns are rather short-memory processes in their nature, we modify Bali et al.’s (2011, 2017) MAX measure and employ a weekly forecast horizon and last week’s daily log-returns for calculating the metric for our portfolio sorts. From an econometric point of view, this study proposes statistical tests that are robust to unknown dynamic dependency structures in the cryptocurrency data. Our results show that average raw and risk adjusted return differences between cryptocurrencies in the lowest and highest MAX deciles exceed 1.50% per week. These re…
On the Tail Risk of Cyberattacks in the Bitcoin Market
In the era of digitalization, cryptocurrencies have become an alternative asset for both retail and institutional investors. While the new emerging digital ecosystem based on blockchain technology has been praised for offering plenty of advantages such as decentralization, discretion or increased efficiency in terms of faster settlements among others, investors need to be aware of new types of risks such as hacking incidents. In the 2011-2018 period, about 1.7 million unit of Bitcoin have been stolen corresponding to losses accumulating more than $655 million highlighting the societal impact of this criminal activity. The novel aspect of our study is that it employs a recently proposed appr…
Factor Momentum, Investor Sentiment, and Option-Implied Volatility-Scaling
Factor momentum produces robust average returns that exhibit a similar economic magnitude as documented for stock price momentum. To the extent that the PEAD factor captures mispricing, winner factors profit from being long on underpriced stocks and short on overpriced stocks. Oppositely, loser factors’ negative exposure to the PEAD factor suggests that loser factors capture mispricing by being long on overpriced stocks and short on underpriced stocks. Option-implied volatility scaling increases both the economic magnitude and statistical significance of factor momentum. Factor momentum is not exposed to the same crashes as stock price momentum and could therefore serve as a hedge for stock…
Another Look on Choosing Factors: The International Evidence
Extending Fama and French’s (2018) U.S. study on choosing factors to international equity markets, we test nested and non-nested asset pricing models for North America, Europe, Asia excluding Japan, and Japan. For non-nested models, we propose a new simulation methodology using a blocks bootstrap approach that takes into account factor dependencies. The resultant out-of-sample Sharpe ratios across all models and countries are lower than Fama and French’s pairs bootstrap approach. While we confirm that the six-factor model with market, size, and small size spread factors for value, profit, investment, and momentum produces the highest maximum squared Sharpe ratio in most economies, an except…
Another Look at Industry Momentum and the Cross Section of Expected Returns
This paper investigates whether industry affiliation matters to implementing industry momentum strategies. After discriminating between relevant and redundant industries it shows that only a subset corresponding to less than 50% of the overall market capitalization generates significant momentum payoffs. Industry momentum is only priced in the cross section of expected returns when relevant industries are used as test assets. An out-of-sample experiment utilizing a new double-sorting approach is proposed. It incorporates a learning period to condition momentum strategies on relevant industries and offers evidence that the conditional momentum strategy generates up to 30% higher payoffs than…
Combining Value and Momentum: Evidence from the Nordic Equity Market
This is the first paper that explores Fisher, Shah and Titman’s (2016) average ranking approach for the value and momentum strategy in the Nordic equity market offering an exceptional experimental environment. Our results indicate that in the Nordic stock markets, the value anomaly offered excess returns in the 1993 to 2017 sample period only when small stocks were a part of the portfolio, whereas the momentum effect is strong and significant, irrespective of size. Interestingly, our findings also indicate that the negative correlation between value and momentum (Asness, Moskowitz and Pedersen, 2013) seems to be driven by growth stocks: Winner stocks that are value stocks generated 1.66% pe…
Return Dispersion and Cross-Sectional Asset Pricing Anomalies
Recent research finds that cross-sectional return dispersion provides a risk-based explanation for some investment anomalies, including accrual, investment, and momentum strategies. This study extends the analyses of return dispersion to a broad set of anomalies by testing whether the state of return dispersion is associated with anomalous returns. Empirical results for 12 well-known anomalies indicate a robust link between good and bad states of return dispersion and most anomalies. Also, return dispersion helps to explain a number anomalies regardless of their association with investor sentiment. We conclude that market risk related to return dispersion plays an important role in many inv…
Is There a Credit Risk Anomaly in FX Markets?
This paper explores whether a link between sovereign credit ratings and currency returns exists. Perhaps contrary to expectations, it finds that currencies of countries with higher credit risk tend to generate lower returns than those with a lower credit risk. The credit risk spread cannot be explained by standard risk factors.
Growth in Average Firm Size of U.S. Industrial Portfolios and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns
This paper shows that growth in average firm size in U.S. industrial portfolios predicts future growth in average firm size. Moreover, the payoffs of industrial portfolios sorted by growth in average firm size in the previous period increase linearly as we move from lowest to highest growth in average firm size. The spread between highest and lowest growth in average firm size is economically large and cannot be explained by exposures to standard risk factors or the asset growth effect (Cooper, Gulen, and Schill, 2008). Principal component analysis reveals that this growth in average firm size effect is linked to the first principal component. Moreover, stochastic discount factor model anal…
Contagion of Uncertainty: Transmission of Risk from the Cryptocurrency Market to the Foreign Exchange Market
Earlier research documented that cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, have experienced dramatic fluctuations in both market capitalization and market share in recent years. Unsurprisingly, Bitcoin returns exhibit higher volatility than traditional G-10 currencies. Our paper extends earlier research and investigates the potential impact of news originating from the Bitcoin market. Confirming earlier studies, we find that Bitcoin exhibits dramatically higher volatility than the dollar factor. Surprisingly, our findings indicate that only hacking incidents that occur in the Bitcoin market result in high levels of co-movement in the risk of both markets the cryptocurrency and the G-10 currency …
Corruption, Carry Trades, and the Cross Section of Currency Returns
This is the first paper to explore the effects of perceived corruption on the FX market. It finds that the currencies of countries perceived to suffer from high levels of corruption generate statistically significantly lower returns than the currencies of countries perceived to have low levels of corruption. Moreover, the portfolio spread is highly correlated with NBER recessions and U.S. consumption growth of nondurable goods. Interestingly, stochastic discount factor model analysis reveals that the portfolio spread is useful for pricing the cross section of currency returns, even when controlling for standard FX risk factors.
Predicting Cryptocurrency Defaults
We examine all available 146 Proof-of-Work based cryptocurrencies that started trading prior to the end of 2014 and track their performance until December 2018. We find that about 60% of those cryptocurrencies were eventually in default. The substantial sums of money involved mean those bankruptcies will have an enormous societal impact. Employing cryptocurrency-specific data, we estimate a model based on linear discriminant analysis to predict such defaults. Our model is capable of explaining 87% of cryptocurrency bankruptcies after only one month of trading and could serve as a screening tool for investors keen to boost overall portfolio performance and avoid investing in unreliable crypt…
Identifying Portfolio-Based Risk Factors in Foreign Exchange Markets
This paper shows that a link between the conditional mean and conditional volatility of any factor-mimicking portfolio in the foreign exchange (FX) market must exist if the proposed portfolio-based currency factor is priced and the pricing kernel has a linear factor structure. Thereby, this paper tests whether the carry risk factor and currency momentum are priced risk factors. Surprisingly, the carry risk factor does not meet the necessary conditions consistent with being a priced risk factor, whereas currency momentum indeed meets those criteria. The findings also indicate that the relation between the conditional mean and conditional risk is moreover economically reasonable for the curre…
Equilibrium in Asset Prices: Evidence from Cryptocurrencies
Employing daily data on ten cryptocurrencies that exhibit the highest market capitalization, we find one instance of cointegration equilibrium in the 2016 2018 period. Contrary to earlier studies that report cryptocurrency markets are developing toward market efficiency, our findings suggest that even the most liquid cryptocurrency markets are inefficient.
Option-Implied Volatility-Managed Asset Pricing Risk Factors and Resurrection of the Value Factor
Option-implied volatility-managed risk factor models produce higher maximum squared Sharpe ratios than the recently proposed six-factor model, which is used as a benchmark model in this study. A model that incorporates option-implied volatility-managed risk factors based on dynamic scaling factors that systematically overestimate the expected market risk, as measured by the VIX, is superior to other asset pricing model specifications. After the death of the value factor has been repeatedly declared, it is surprising news that multivariate spanning regressions reveal that both the option-implied volatility-managed momentum and value factor are the only option-implied volatility-managed risk …
Speculation and lottery-like demand in cryptocurrency markets
Abstract This is the first paper that explores lottery-like demand in cryptocurrency markets. Since recent research provides evidence that cryptocurrency returns appear to be short-memory processes, we modify Bali, Cakici and Whitelaw’s (2011) and Bali, Brown, Murray, and Tang’s (2017) MAX measure and employ a weekly forecast horizon and daily log-returns from the previous week to calculate the metric for our portfolio sorts. From an econometric point of view, this study proposes statistical tests that are robust to unknown dynamic dependency structures in the cryptocurrency data. Our results show that average raw and risk-adjusted return differences between cryptocurrencies in the lowest a…
How Much Are We Willing To Lose in Cyberspace? On the Tail Risk of Scam in the Market for Initial Coin Offerings
From an entrepreneurial perspective, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has become an alternative way for attaining funding for business projects using the new evolving digital financial market for tokens. Unfortunately, the majority of all ICOs are subject to scam which casts doubt on this new innovative tool for acquiring funding. Using a unique intensively hand-collected data set covering more than 5000 ICOs which have been launched in the August 2014–December 2019 period, we could identify 1014 ICOs exhibiting data on raised funding whereof 576 turned out to be scams projects. The cumulative losses due to scam in the ICO market correspond to $10.12 billion which is 66% of our identified overal…
Risk-Managed 52-Week High Industry Momentum, Momentum Crashes, and Hedging Macroeconomic Risk
This is the first study that investigates the profitability of Barroso and Santa-Clara’s (2015) risk managing approach for George and Hwang’s (2004) 52-week high momentum strategy in an industrial portfolio setting. The findings indicate that risk-managing adds value as the Sharpe ratio increases, and the downside risk remarkably decreases. Even after controlling for the spread of the traditional 52-week high industry momentum strategy in association with standard risk-factors, the risk-managed version generates economically and statistically significant payoffs. Notably, the risk-managed strategy is partially explained by changes in cross-sectional return dispersion, whereas the traditiona…
Volatility-Managing International Equity Risk Factors
Recent research (see Moreira and Muir, 2017) suggests that volatility-managed portfolios take less risk when volatility is high produce large alphas, increase Sharpe ratios, and produce large utility gains for mean-variance investors. We extend this literature by investigating the profitability of volatility-managing the Fama and French (2017) local risk factors in international equity markets. Our general findings indicate that volatility-managing adds value for local risk factors in Europe and Asia, whereas in Japan we find no such evidence. Confirming earlier studies, we find that a risk-based story is unlikely to explain our results.
On the stability of stablecoins
This paper investigates the volatility processes of stablecoins and their potential stochastic interdependencies with Bitcoin volatility. We employ a novel approach to choose the optimal combination for the power law exponent and the minimum value for the volatilities bending the power law. Our results indicate that Bitcoin volatility is well-behaved in a statistical sense with a finite theoretical variance. Surprisingly, the volatilities of stablecoins are statistically unstable and contemporaneously respond to Bitcoin volatility. Also, whereas the volatilities of stablecoins are not Granger-causal for Bitcoin volatility, lagged Bitcoin volatility exhibits Granger-causal effects on the vol…
The Market Price of Credit Risk and Economic States
This paper proposes a market-wide credit risk factor for the US stock market and investigates its properties that are dependent on economic conditions. The market price of credit risk is found to be statistically significantly negative, supporting earlier studies. However, a sample-split analysis reveals that this negative pay-off is non-existent in a later subsample, indicating that the credit risk puzzle is based on temporary mispricing related to the earlier subsample. Further investigation shows that mispricing in the earlier period was mainly driven by positive pay-offs of low credit risk firms, while high credit risk firms did not generate significant returns in any of the sub-periods.
Identifying Portfolio-Based Systematic Risk Factors in Equity Markets
Four new prominent asset pricing factors have recently been proposed. We test whether these factors fulfill necessary conditions for qualifying those as risk factors. We show that the investment and betting-against-beta factors fulfill these conditions. However, the profitability and quality factors do not fulfill these conditions pointing towards non-risk-based explanations.
Option-Implied Volatility Spillovers between Risk Factors in FX Markets and States of the Global Economy
This study employs option price data to back out the implied portfolio volatilities of the dollar and carry trade risk factors of the G-10 currencies. To investigate expected volatility spillover effects between risk factors in FX markets, we extend Grobys (2015) and Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) by constructing expected volatility spillover indices based upon the forecast-error variance decomposition of Vector-Autoregression models employing option-implied portfolio volatilities. Surprisingly, the dollar and carry trade risk factors that are orthogonal in the first moment exhibit strong stochastic interrelations in the second expected moment. Our findings indicate that expected high spillover …