We report the results of research on the momentum and contrarian effects in the cryptocurrency market. The investment strategies investigated involved 100 (among more than 1,200 available as of November 2017) cryptocurrencies with the largest market capitalization and 14-day average daily volume that exceed a given threshold value. Investment portfolios are built using different assumptions regarding the portfolio reallocation period, the width of the classification window, the number of cryptocurrencies in the portfolio, and the percentage of transaction fees. Performance compared with equal weighted investments and by market capitalization across all classified assets, and with a buy and hold strategy based on the S&P500 index and Bitcoin price. Our results show a clear and significant dominance of short-term converse effects over momentum effects and the benchmark portfolio. The information ratio coefficient for contrarian strategies often exceeds the double-digit value depending on the assumed reallocation period and the width of the classification window. Additionally, we see significant diversification potential for all cryptocurrency portfolios relative to the S&P500 index.
Introduction
In recent years, and especially in 2017, we have been able to clearly witness the violent and sudden development of the cryptocurrency market. New crypto assets emerge every week, many of which tempt potential investors with great opportunities, but often offer as much promise as legal and ethical questions. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain, the technology that underpins them, have been under investigation since the bitcoin maker/creator manifesto was published. However, most of the previous research has mainly focused on the technical and legal aspects of cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Recently, the cryptocurrency market began to be considered as a serious, albeit controversial and risky, candidate for a new asset class . The general consensus among researchers is that today's highly volatile cryptocurrency market can be used primarily for short-term and speculative hedging purposes and that volume can predict returns in the meantime. Another bitcoin speculative bubble is reported daily by the mainstream media to appear in the near future, and the scientific evidence for such a bubble seems plausible . Recent studies on cryptocurrency econometrics include approaches that use autoregressive models or articles that analyze some stylistic facts of the Bitcoin market . On the other hand, we observe a more pessimistic analysis of the cryptocurrency environment, especially if we focus on the profitability of mining and, consequently, on the ability of subsequent blocks to continue to be exploited
One might assume that the cryptocurrency market is currently at the same stage of development as the financial markets during the first decades of the 20th century. In this context, the question of the current level of information efficiency of the cryptocurrency market naturally arises. Do known regulated market anomalies also exist in the cryptocurrency market? If so, to what extent? How strong is this? Is it possible to use these effects to build investment strategies that provide excessive returns? The issue of the efficiency of Bitcoin market information was previously done by Bariviera.
Methodology
The main idea behind the momentum strategy is to achieve excess returns through investing in assets that have recently earned the highest returns. On the other hand, the reverse strategy assumes the opposite: one should invest in the asset that has experienced the most recent decline. It is important to point out that at the outset in both cases we must define a set of assumptions that, however arbitrary, are key to measuring the profitability of the company under investigation.
Conclusions
In our article, we report the results of investigating the existence and strength of momentum and contrarian effects in a set of more than 1,200 cryptocurrencies in the period from May 12, 2014 to October 28, 2017. Our results demonstrate clearly a strong contrary effect (with the strongest being observed at daily levels, Table 3) and a lack of analogous momentum effects in the cryptocurrency market. Therefore, referring to our research question, we can say that the anomaly is known from