The relevance of media sentiment for small and large scale bitcoin investors

Abstract

We provide a novel perspective on the Bitcoin market, investigating determinants of investor positions and their response to public information proxied by sentiment indicators. We distinguish between investors by size and observe their respective behaviour concerning incoming information. We find that price dynamics and media coverage lead to different decisions depending on the Bitcoin portfolio size. Retail investors react strongly to incoming public information and media narratives, with their decisions strongly influenced by sentiment and media attention. Conversely, the response of large-scale investors to such information is much weaker because they arguably have different, non-public information and divergent investment objectives.