The Impact of Investor Sentiment on Bitcoin Returns and Conditional Volatilities during the Era of Covid-19

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of investor sentiment on the Bitcoin returns and conditional volatility taking into account the Covid-19 outbreak by using different investor sentiment proxies and by employing the EGARCH model. Estimation results show that investor sentiment has a positive impact on the Bitcoin returns and their volatility, especially after the Covid-19 outbreak. The VAR model is employed to investigate whether investor sentiment and Bitcoin returns are related in a dynamic setting and to make distinguish between rational and irrational investor sentiments. The results from the VAR model show that both rational and irrational investor sentiments have an impact on Bitcoin returns indicating that the Bitcoin market is also driven by emotions and noise traders have an impact on the data generating process of Bitcoin returns. The positive impact of investor sentiment can be attributed to the fear of missing out (FOMO) behavior of speculative and irrational investors.