21/1/20: Investor Fear and Uncertainty in Cryptocurrencies

Our paper on behavioral biases in cryptocurrencies trading is now published by the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance volume 25, 2020:

We cover investor sentiment effects on pricing processes of 10 largest (by market capitalization) crypto-currencies, showing direct but non-linear impact of herding and anchoring biases in investor behavior. We also show that these biases are themselves anchored to the specific trends/direction of price movements. Our results provide direct links between investors' sentiment toward:

1. Overall risky assets investment markets,
2. Cryptocurrencies investment markets, and
3. Macroeconomic conditions,

and market price dynamics for crypto-assets. We also show direct evidence that both markets uncertainty and investor fear sentiment drive price processes for crypto-assets.

3/7/19: Record Recovery: Duration and Perceptions

While last month the ongoing 'recovery' has clocked the longest duration of all recoveries in the U.S. history (see chart 1 below), there is a continued and sustained perception of this recovery as being somehow weak.

And, in fairness, based on real GDP growth during the modern business cycles (next chart), current expansion is hardly impressive:

However, public perceptions should really be more closely following personal disposal income dynamics than the aggregate economic output growth. So here is a chart plotting evolution of the real disposable income per capita through business cycles:

By disposable income metrics, here is what matters:

1. The Great Recession was horrific in terms of duration and depth of declines in personal disposable income.
2. The recovery has been extremely volatile over the first 7 years.
3. It took 22 quarters for personal disposable income to recover to the levels seen in the third quarter of the recovery.

So what matters to the public perception of the recovery in the current cycle is the long-lasting memory of the collapse, laced with the negative perceptions lingering from the early years of the recovery.

To confirm this, look at the average rate of recovery in the real disposable income per quarter of the recovery cycle. The next two charts plot this metric, relative to the (a) full business cycle - from the start of the recession to the end of the recovery (next chart) and (b) recovery cycle alone - from the trough of the recession to the end of the recovery (second chart below):

So looking at the trough-to-peak part of the cycle (the expansion part of the cycle) alone implies we are experiencing the best recovery on modern record. But looking at the start-of-recession-to-end-of-recovery cycle, the current recovery period has been less than spectacular, ranking fourth in strength overall.

Which is, of course, to say that our negative perceptions of the recovery are anchored to our experience of the crisis. We are, after all, behavioral animals, rather than rational agents.

24/11/18: Wisdom of Crowds, Meta-Knowledge and Behavioral Biases in Scalable Data

Social networks: scale, biases and the notion of the 'wisdom of crowds'... Here are my lecture notes from the Behavioral Finance and Economics course @MIIS:

19/11/17: Mainstream Media & Fake News: Twin Forces Behind Voter Behavior Biases

Behavioral biases come in all shapes and forms. Many of these, however, relate to the issue of imperfect information (e.g. asymmetric information, instances of costly information gathering and processing that can distort decision-making, incomplete information, etc).

A recent Quartz article on the balance of threats/risks arising from the 'fake news' phenomenon (the distortion of facts presented, sometimes, by alternative and mainstream media alike) and another informational asymmetry, namely selectivity biases (which apply to our propensity to select information either due to its proximity to us - e.g. referencing bias, or due to its ideological value to us - e.g. confirmation bias, etc). Note: Quartz article is available here: https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-isnt-fake-news-its-selective-facts/.

According to the article: "News sources aim to cover—in the words of the editor in chief of Reuters—the “facts [we] need to make good decisions.”" But, "As readers, we also suffer from what’s called confirmation bias: We tend to seek out news organizations and social media posts that confirm our views. Selective facts occur precisely for this reason." In other words, confirmation bias is a part of our use and understanding of information. The author concludes that "Selective facts are worse than outright fake news because they’re pervasive and harder to question than clearly false statements."

So far so good. except for one thing. The article does not go in detail into why selective facts are, all of a sudden, prevalent in today's world. Why does confirmation bias (and, unmentioned by the author, proximity heuristic) matter today more than they mattered yesterday?

The answer to this, at least in part, has to be the continued polarization of the mainstream media (and, following it, non-traditional media).

Here is a PewResearch study from 2014 on ideological polarization in the mainstream media and social media: http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/.  Two charts from this:

Not enough to drive home the point? Ok, here is from Forbes article covering the topic (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettedkins/2017/06/27/u-s-media-among-most-polarized-in-the-world-study-finds/#1ee9a3242546):
"The Reuters Institute recently released its 2017 Digital News Report, analyzing surveys from 70,000 people across 36 countries and providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of modern news consumption. The report reveals several important media trends, including rising polarization in the United States. While 51% of left-leaning Americans trust the news, only 20% of conservatives say the same. Right-leaning Americans are far more likely to say they avoid the news because “I can’t rely on news to be true.""

The trend is not new. In the 1990s, plenty of research have shown that print and cable media have started drifting (polarizing) away from the 'centre-focused' news reporting as local monopolies of newspapers and TV stations started to experience challenges from competitors. You can read about this here:

• Tuning Out or Tuning Elsewhere? Partisanship, Polarization, and Media Migration from 1998 to 2006 by Barry A. Hollander (2008), Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Volume 85, Issue 1, which posits a view that polarization of the mass media has been driving moderate voters away from news and toward entertainment. Which, of course, effectively hollows out the 'centre' of media ideological spectrum. 
• "This article examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates," according to "Media and Political Polarization" published in Annual Review of Political Science Vol. 16:101-127 (May 2013) by Markus Prior.
• And economics of media polarization in "Political polarization and the electoral effects of media bias" by Dan Bernhardt, Stefan Krasa, and Mattias Polborn, published in Journal of Public Economics, Volume 92, Issues 5–6, June 2008, Pages 1092-1104

These are just three examples, but there are plenty more (hundreds, in fact) of research papers looking into twin, causally interlinked, effects of media polarization and the rise of the polarized voter preferences.

Which brings us to the Quartz's observation: "While social media and partisan news has allowed more voices to be heard, it also means we are now surrounded by more people manipulating what facts make it to our newsfeeds. We’d draw a different conclusion—or even just a more nuanced picture—if we were given all the information on an issue, not just the parts that best benefit a particular viewpoint."

It may be true, indeed, that current markets for supply of alt-news are enabling greater confirmation bias prevalence in voter attitudes. But it is at best just a fraction of the complete diagnosis. In fact, the polarized, or put differently - biased, nature of the mainstream news is at least as responsible for the evolution of these biases, as it is responsible for the growth in alt-news. That is correct: fake information is finding are more accepting audiences today, in part, because the CNN and FoxNews have decided to cultivate ideologically polarized market differentiation for their platforms in the past.

18/11/17: ECB Induces Double Error in the EU Policy Markets

In economics, two key market asymmetries/biases lead to the severe reduction in markets efficiency often marking the departure from theoretical levels of efficiency (speed, with which markets incorporate new relevant information into pricing decisions of markets agents) and the practical outcomes. These asymmetries or biases are: information asymmetry and agency problem.

For those, uninitiated into econospeak, information asymmetry (sometimes referred to as information failure), is a situation, in which one party to an economic transaction possesses greater knowledge of facts, material or relevant to the decision, than the other party. For example, a seller may know hidden information about a car on offer that is not revealed to the buyer. In more extreme example, a seller might actively conceal such information from a buyer. This can happen when a seller 'prepares' the car for sale by cleaning the engine, thus removing leaks and accumulations of oil and / or coolant that can indicate the areas where the problems might be.

The agency problem, also referred to as principal-agent problem, arises when an agent, acting on behalf of the principal, has distinct set of incentives from the principal. The resulting risk is that the agent will act in self-interest to undermine the goals and objectives of the principal. An example here would be a real estate agent contracted by the seller, while taking a commission kickback from the buyer. Or vice versa.

Occasionally, both problems combine to produce an even more powerful distortionary result, pushing the markets further away from finding a 'true' (or fundamentals-justified) price point.

Today, we have an example of such interaction. As reported in Euractiv, the ECB has denied the EU Court of Auditors access to data on Greek bailout. (Full story here: http://www.euractiv.com/section/all/news/ecb-denies-eu-auditors-access-to-information-on-greek-bailouts/) The claimed justification: banking secrecy. The result:

1. There is now clearly an asymmetry in information between the EU, the Court of Auditors, and the ECB when it comes to assessing the ECB actions in the Greek bailout(s). The 'car salesman' (the ECB) has scrubbed out information about the 'vehicle' (the bailout(s)) when presenting it to the 'buyer' and is refusing to show any evidence on pre-scrubbed 'car'.
2. And there is an agency problem. The ECB is an agent for the EU (and thus an agent relative to the principal - the EU Court of Auditors, which represents the interest of the EU). As an agent, the ECB has a contractual obligation to act in the interest of the EU. But as a part of the Troika in the case of the Greek bailout(s), the ECB is also contracted into a set of incentives to act in concert with other players: the sub-set of the EU, namely the EU Commission and the EFSF/ESM funds, and the IMF. At least one of these agents, the IMF, has a strong incentives to avoid transparent discovery of information about the Greek bailout(s) because these bailout(s) have, potentially, violated the IMF by-laws in lending to distressed countries. Another agent, the EU Commission, has an incentive to conceal the truth about the same bailout(s) in order to sustain a claim that the Greek bailout(s) are(were) a success. The third set of the agents (various EU funds that backed the bailout(s)) has incentives to sustain the pretence that the Greek bailout(s) were within the funds' bylaws and did not constitute state aid to the insolvent government.

In simple terms, the ECB refusal to release information on Greek bailout(s) to the EU Court of Auditors is a fundamental violation of the entire concept of the common market principle that overrides any other consideration, including the consideration of monetary policy independence. This so because the action of the ECB induces two most basic, most fundamental failures into the market: the agency problem and the asymmetric information problem, which are (even when taken independently from each other) the core drivers for market failures.