Bitcoin a Safe Haven Candidate?

Should investors consider Bitcoin as a safe haven from turbulent financial markets? In their June 2018 paper entitled “Bitcoin as a Safe Haven: Is It Even Worth Considering?”, Lee Smales and Dirk Baur assess the potential for Bitcoin as a safe haven, focusing on considerations beyond its low return correlations with other assets during times of market stress. Their comparison set of assets consists of gold (GLD) and bonds (10-year U.S. Treasury futures) as traditional safe havens, a proxy for the U.S. stock index (SPY) and mature (Apple) and immature (Twitter) individual stocks. They match samples by removing Bitcoin data for weekends and holidays. Using daily returns for Bitcoin and the comparison set of assets during August 2011 through May 2018, they find that: (more…)