Can Investors Benefit from the Phase Difference Between Countries and Overreaction of the Major World Markets During the Pandemics? Study on the Covid-19 Case

Abstract

While the Covid-19 pandemic affected the world economies and investors’ behavior, it caused serious volatility in asset prices. Studies on Covid-19 in the literature generally analyzed the relationship between the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the performance of the stock markets. In this study, different from the literature, it has been tested whether investors can benefit from the phase difference between countries and overreaction in stock prices during the pandemic. In the study, which included 48 of the world's leading stock exchanges, countries were classified according to the time the epidemic progressed and the loss of stock market indices. Regardless of the country-based progression of the pandemic, it was observed that the global news flow was more effective in the pricing of different stock markets. On the other hand, it has been observed that the indices of the countries where the epidemic first spread, performed 6% worse than other indices on average, but this difference has closed over time. Another finding of the study is that the indices that lost the most during the period when the pandemic spread were the ones that showed the highest performance in the following period. This finding supports the overreaction hypothesis.

Keywords

• COVID-19 and Stock Markets
• Pandemics
• Overreaction
• Statistical Arbitrage

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