In a real-world situation produced under COVID-19 scenarios, predicting cryptocurrency returns accurately can be challenging. Such a prediction may be helpful to the daily economic and financial market. Unlike forecasting the cryptocurrency returns, we propose a new approach to predict whether the return classification would be in the first, second, third quartile, or any quantile of the gold price the next day. In this paper, we employ the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm for exploring the predictability of financial returns for the six major digital currencies selected from the list of top ten cryptocurrencies based on data collected through sensors. These currencies are Binance Coin, Bitcoin, Cardano, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. Our study considers the pre-COVID-19 and ongoing COVID-19 periods. An algorithm that allows updated data analysis, based on the use of a sensor in the database, is also proposed. The results show strong evidence that the SVM is a robust technique for devising profitable trading strategies and can provide accurate results before and during the current pandemic. Our findings may be helpful for different stakeholders in understanding the cryptocurrency dynamics and in making better investment decisions, especially under adverse conditions and during times of uncertain environments such as in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this article, we introduce a novel deep learning hybrid model that integrates attention Transformer and gated recurrent unit (GRU) architectures to improve the accuracy of cryptocurrency price predictions. By combining the Transformer’s strength in capturing long-range patterns with GRU’s ability to model short-term and sequential trends, the hybrid model provides a well-rounded approach to time series forecasting. We apply the model to predict the daily closing prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum based on historical data that include past prices, trading volumes, and the Fear and Greed Index. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model by comparing it with four other machine learning models, two are non-sequential feedforward models: radial basis function network (RBFN) and general regression neural network (GRNN), and two are bidirectional sequential memory-based models: bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). The model’s performance is assessed using several metrics, including mean squared error (MSE), root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), along with statistical validation through the non-parametric Friedman test followed by a post hoc Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Results demonstrate that our hybrid model consistently achieves superior accuracy, highlighting its effectiveness for financial prediction tasks. These findings provide valuable insights for enhancing real-time decision making in cryptocurrency markets and support the growing use of hybrid deep learning models in financial analytics.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the RavenPack news-based index associated with coronavirus outbreak (Panic, Sentiment, Infodemic, and Media Coverage) and returns of two commodities—Bitcoin and gold. We utilized the novel quantile-on-quantile approach to uncover the dependence between the news-based index associated with coronavirus outbreak and Bitcoin and gold returns. Our results reveal that the daily levels of positive and negative shocks in indices induced by pandemic news asymmetrically affect the Bearish and Bullish on Bitcoin and gold, and fear sentiment induced by coronavirus-related news plays a major role in driving the values of Bitcoin and gold more than other indices. We find that both commodities, Bitcoin and gold, can serve as a hedge against pandemic-related news. In general, the COVID-19 pandemic-related news encourages people to invest in gold and Bitcoin.

Esam Mahdi, Ali H. Abuzaid, Abdu M. A. Atta. CSAM 2020;27:547-68. https://doi.org/10.29220/CSAM.2020.27.5.547