Bitcoin as well as other cryptocurrencies are all plagued by the impact from bifurcation. Since the marginal cost of bifurcation is theoretically zero, it causes the coin holders to doubt on the existence of the coin's intrinsic value. This paper suggests a normative dual-value theory to assess the fundamental value of Bitcoin. We draw on the experience from the art market, where similar replication problems are prevalent. The idea is to decompose the total value of a cryptocurrency into two parts: one is its art value and the other is its use value. The tradeoff between these two values is also analyzed, which enlightens our proposal of an image coin for Bitcoin so as to elevate its use value without sacrificing its art value. To show the general validity of the dual-value theory, we also apply it to evaluate the prospects of four major cryptocurrencies. We find this framework is helpful for both the investors and the exchanges to examine a new coin's value when it first appears in the market.

We take a new look at the problem of disentangling the volatility and jumps processes in a panel of stock daily returns. We first provide an efficient computational framework that deals with the stochastic volatility model with Poisson-driven jumps in a univariate scenario that offers a competitive inference alternative to the existing implementation tools. This methodology is then extended to a large set of stocks in which it is assumed that the unobserved jump intensities of each stock co-evolve in time through a dynamic factor model. A carefully designed sequential Monte Carlo algorithm provides out-of-sample empirical evidence that our suggested model outperforms, with respect to predictive Bayes factors, models that do not exploit the panel structure of stocks.

Bitcoin is considered the most valuable currency in the world. Besides being highly valuable, its value has also experienced a steep increase, from around 1 dollar in 2010 to around 18000 in 2017. Then, in recent years, it has attracted considerable attention in a diverse set of fields, including economics and computer science. The former mainly focuses on studying how it affects the market, determining reasons behinds its price fluctuations, and predicting its future prices. The latter mainly focuses on its vulnerabilities, scalability, and other techno-crypto-economic issues. Here, we aim at revealing the usefulness of traditional autoregressive integrative moving average (ARIMA) model in predicting the future value of bitcoin by analyzing the price time series in a 3-years-long time period. On the one hand, our empirical studies reveal that this simple scheme is efficient in sub-periods in which the behavior of the time-series is almost unchanged, especially when it is used for short-term prediction, e.g. 1-day. On the other hand, when we try to train the ARIMA model to a 3-years-long period, during which the bitcoin price has experienced different behaviors, or when we try to use it for a long-term prediction, we observe that it introduces large prediction errors. Especially, the ARIMA model is unable to capture the sharp fluctuations in the price, e.g. the volatility at the end of 2017. Then, it calls for more features to be extracted and used along with the price for a more accurate prediction of the price. We have further investigated the bitcoin price prediction using an ARIMA model, trained over a large dataset, and a limited test window of the bitcoin price, with length $w$, as inputs. Our study sheds lights on the interaction of the prediction accuracy, choice of ($p,q,d$), and window size $w$.

Deep Learning is applied to energy markets to predict extreme loads observed in energy grids. Forecasting energy loads and prices is challenging due to sharp peaks and troughs that arise due to supply and demand fluctuations from intraday system constraints. We propose deep spatio-temporal models and extreme value theory (EVT) to capture theses effects and in particular the tail behavior of load spikes. Deep LSTM architectures with ReLU and $\tanh$ activation functions can model trends and temporal dependencies while EVT captures highly volatile load spikes above a pre-specified threshold. To illustrate our methodology, we use hourly price and demand data from 4719 nodes of the PJM interconnection, and we construct a deep predictor. We show that DL-EVT outperforms traditional Fourier time series methods, both in-and out-of-sample, by capturing the observed nonlinearities in prices. Finally, we conclude with directions for future research.

While time series momentum is a well-studied phenomenon in finance, common strategies require the explicit definition of both a trend estimator and a position sizing rule. In this paper, we introduce Deep Momentum Networks -- a hybrid approach which injects deep learning based trading rules into the volatility scaling framework of time series momentum. The model also simultaneously learns both trend estimation and position sizing in a data-driven manner, with networks directly trained by optimising the Sharpe ratio of the signal. Backtesting on a portfolio of 88 continuous futures contracts, we demonstrate that the Sharpe-optimised LSTM improved traditional methods by more than two times in the absence of transactions costs, and continue outperforming when considering transaction costs up to 2-3 basis points. To account for more illiquid assets, we also propose a turnover regularisation term which trains the network to factor in costs at run-time.

This study suggests a new decomposition of the effect of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on long-term growth in developing countries. It reveals that FDI not only have a positive direct effect on growth, but also increase the latter by reducing the recessionary effect resulting from a banking crisis. Even more, they reduce its occurrence. JEL: F65, F36, G01, G15

Financial portfolio management is one of the problems that are most frequently encountered in the investment industry. Nevertheless, it is not widely recognized that both Kelly Criterion and Risk Parity collapse into Mean Variance under some conditions, which implies that a universal solution to the portfolio optimization problem could potentially exist. In fact, the process of sequential computation of optimal component weights that maximize the portfolio's expected return subject to a certain risk budget can be reformulated as a discrete-time Markov Decision Process (MDP) and hence as a stochastic optimal control, where the system being controlled is a portfolio consisting of multiple investment components, and the control is its component weights. Consequently, the problem could be solved using model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) without knowing specific component dynamics. By examining existing methods of both value-based and policy-based model-free RL for the portfolio optimization problem, we identify some of the key unresolved questions and difficulties facing today's portfolio managers of applying model-free RL to their investment portfolios.

This non-linear relationship in the joint time-frequency domain has been studied for the Indian National Stock Exchange (NSE) with the international Gold price and WTI Crude Price being converted from Dollar to Indian National Rupee based on that week's closing exchange rate. Though a good correlation was obtained during some period, but as a whole no such cointegration relation can be found out. Using the \textit{Discrete Wavelet Analysis}, the data was decomposed and the presence of Granger Causal relations was tested. Unfortunately no significant relationships are being found. We then studied the \textit{Wavelet Coherence} of the two pairs viz. NSE-Nifty \& Gold and NSE-Nifty \& Crude. For different frequencies, the coherence between the pairs have been studied. At lower frequencies, some relatively good coherence have been found. In this paper, we report for the first time the co-movements between Crude Oil, Gold and Indian Stock Market Index using Wavelet Analysis (both Discrete and Continuous), a technique which is most sophisticated and recent in market analysis. Thus for long term traders they can include gold and/or crude in their portfolio along with NSE-Nifty index in order to decrease the risk(volatility) of the portfolio for Indian Market. But for short term traders, it will not be effective, not to include all the three in their portfolio.

Monte Carlo Simulations of agent-based models in science and especially in the economic literature have become a widely used modeling approach. In many applications the number of agents is huge and the models are formulated as a large system of difference equations. In this study we discuss four numerical aspects which we present exemplified by two agent-based computational economic market models; the Levy-Levy-Solomon model and the Franke-Westerhoff model. First, we discuss finite-size effects present in the Levy-Levy-Solomon model and show that this behavior originates from the scaling within the model. Secondly, we discuss the impact of a low-quality random number generator on the simulation output. Furthermore, we discuss the continuous formulation of difference equations and the impact on the model behavior. Finally, we show that a continuous formulation makes it possible to employ correct numerical solvers in order to obtain correct simulation results. We conclude that it is of immanent importance to simulate the model with a large number of agents in order to exclude finite-size effects and to use a well tested pseudo random number generator. Furthermore, we argue that a continuous formulation of agent-based models is advantageous since it allows the application of proper numerical methods and it admits a unique continuum limit.