Download This PaperA Sentiment-Based Model for the Bitcoin: Theory, Estimation and Option Pricing
A revised version of this paper is published under the new title "Market attention and Bitcoin price modeling: theory, estimation and option pricing" in Cretarola, A., Figà-Talamanca, G. & Patacca, M. Decisions in Economics and Finance (2019).
39 Pages Posted: 27 Sep 2017 Last revised: 14 Nov 2022
Date Written: September 3, 2017
Abstract
In recent literature it is claimed that BitCoin price behaves more likely to a volatile stock asset than a currency and that changes in its price are influenced by sentiment about the BitCoin system itself; in Kristoufek the author analyses transaction based as well as popularity based potential drivers of the BitCoin price finding positive evidence. Here, we endorse this finding and consider a bivariate model in continuous time to describe the price dynamics of one BitCoin as well as a second factor, affecting the price itself, which represents a sentiment indicator. We prove that the suggested model is arbitrage-free under a mild condition and, based on risk-neutral evaluation, we obtain a closed formula to approximate the price of European style derivatives on the BitCoin. By applying the same approximation technique to the joint likelihood of a discrete sample of the bivariate process, we are also able to fit the model to market data. This is done by using both the Volume and the number of Google searches as possible proxies for the sentiment factor. Further, the performance of the pricing formula is assessed on a sample of market option prices obtained by the Deribit website.
Keywords: BitCoin, Sentiment, Stochastic Models, Equivalent Martingale Measure, Option Pricing, Likelihood
JEL Classification: C22, C58, G02
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