Hybrid Open Seminar Series

UCL CBT is pleased to announce the first Hybrid Open Seminar of 2022. As a natural evolution of the Online Open Seminar Series that started in the face of the pandemic to give a voice to our research community, we are excited to start hosting Hybrid events too!

This is a great chance to engage with top researchers and industry leaders, sharpen your knowledge of the latest research trends and stay up to date with the newest findings. Moreover, participating in person is a wonderful networking opportunity that could foster one’s career prospects.

Our first guest of the Hybrid Open Seminar Series is José Parra-Moyano from Copenhagen Business School. His talk is titled: “Your Sentiment Matters: A Machine Learning Approach for Predicting Regime Changes in the Cryptocurrency Market”.

Abstract: It is proven that some cryptocurrency investors don’t follow a rational profit-maximizing behavior. This challenges the assumptions that need to be fulfilled for traditional financial models to adequately anticipate the returns on cryptocurrency investments. To overcome this challenge we develop a random forest model that we nurture with features from a sentiment analysis performed on data generated by cryptocurrency users in Google Trends and Reddit. Using features from such a sentiment analysis enables our model to capture the non-rationality of cryptocurrency investors and increases the ability of our model to anticipate regime changes (i.e., sharp return changes) in the cryptocurrency market. Our model outperforms the predictive ability of the Log-Periodic Power Law (LPPL) model—which is the most widely used model to predict regime changes in financial markets. These results have significant implications for scholars in the fields of machine learning, cryptocurrencies, and text analytics, as well as for practitioners investing in the cryptocurrency market.

Joining Instructions:

Everyone is welcomed in the Hybrid Open Seminar Series: students, faculty, industry practitioners, and professionals.

The talk will take place at the building Euston Road (222) in room G01 at 3 pm on July the 27th. For those desiring to join in person and who do not have a UCL student card or badge, please drop a line to blockchain_research@ucl.ac.uk.

To register and join online, use the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ucl-cbt-online-open-seminar-tickets-387550492957