In the financial market, bitcoin, as a virtual asset, has the most prominent risk characteristics in product organization structure and trading place, which can be seen from the following aspects.
First, since the birth of Bitcoin, the negative correlation between its price trend and gold is quite obvious, and gold is an internationally recognized safe-haven asset.
Second, the fluctuation range of Bitcoin is also rare among all financial assets. According to the statistics of researchers, the fluctuation range of 10%-20% is very common for Bitcoin, and the fluctuation range of more than 30% is not without it. For example, on September 4, 2065438/KLOC-0, btc China announced that after September 30, the platform would stop all trading business. The transaction price of Bitcoin in China fell from 30,000 yuan to less than 20,000 yuan, with the lowest 1.75 million yuan; International prices have fallen by nearly 30%.
Third, in the current user structure of Bitcoin, risk-averse users are the majority, while risk-neutral and risk-averse users are obviously not dominant in both quantity and proportion.
Fourth, compared with the stock and futures markets, the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is lacking and highly speculative. Buffett once said that when the gold in the world is put together, it is probably a cube with a side length of 67 feet. As a kind of digital currency, Bitcoin does not need to occupy physical space. The value of bitcoin does not depend on the central bank or the government, but is distributed among individual investors.
Fifth, the decentralized organizational structure of Bitcoin lacks unified supervision. Although the first bitcoin exchange in the United States applied for listing bitcoin funds, this request has been officially rejected. Moreover, digital currency's fraud, hacker attacks, storage risks and other issues make many institutional investors daunting. For example, on June 18, 2065438, Coinrail, a Korean cryptocurrency exchange, claimed that its system had been "invaded by the network", which led to a sharp drop in Bitcoin in one day.
Bitcoin, as the most sensitive field to market risk, has a great relationship with market risk, whether from its negative correlation with safe-haven asset gold or from the characteristics of bitcoin market, such as organization, transaction and investor structure.
The related research of Guotai Junan Securities pointed out that Bitcoin has great fluctuations, which may have a diffusion effect on other risky assets around the world. From the microscopic point of view, it can be attributed to the "herd effect" of the market, that is, investors rely more on the behavior of others and ignore the information they get in the market transaction process. This effect increases the link between the capital market and the "contagiousness" of crisis risk. From the perspective of diffusion, the bitcoin market fluctuates greatly and may be transmitted to risky assets such as stocks and commodities.