On modeling the log-returns of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices against the USA Dollar

Abstract

The study and investigation of the behavior of monetary phenomena is an interesting subject for actuaries and practitioners. In the recent age and development in the monetary and financial phenomena, cryptocurrency has gained much attention from actuaries. Over the past decade, several research studies have emerged on modeling and forecasting cryptocurrency exchange rates. This paper also contributes to the modeling of cryptocurrency exchange rates using a new version of the Logistic distribution, namely, a new cotangent-Logistic distribution. The mathematical properties and estimators of the new cotangent-logistic distribution's parameters are obtained. We illustrate the new cotangent-Logistic distribution using two financial data sets representing the log-returns of the Bitcoin and Ethereum prices. We compare the new cotangent-Logistic distribution with the baseline Logistic distribution and its modified version. Using the p-value and three other statistical tests, we show that the new cotangent-Logistic distribution repeatedly provides the optimal fit to cryptocurrency exchange rates.