Investor attention and cryptocurrency: Evidence from the Bitcoin market

Abstract

This paper adds to the growing literature of cryptocurrency and behavioral finance. Specifically, we investigate the relationships between the novel investor attention and financial characteristics of Bitcoin, i.e., return and realized volatility, which are the two most important characteristics of one certain asset. Our empirical results show supports in the behavior finance area and argue that investor attention is the granger cause to changes in Bitcoin market both in return and realized volatility. Moreover, we make in-depth investigations by exploring the linear and non-linear connections of investor attention on Bitcoin. The results indeed demonstrate that investor attention shows sophisticated impacts on return and realized volatility of Bitcoin. Furthermore, we conduct one basic and several long horizons out-of-sample forecasts to explore the predictive ability of investor attention. The results show that compared with the traditional historical average benchmark model in forecasting technologies, investor attention improves prediction accuracy in Bitcoin return. Finally, we build economic portfolios based on investor attention and argue that investor attention can further generate significant economic values. To sum up, investor attention is a non-negligible pricing factor for Bitcoin asset.