Forecasting cryptocurrencies log-returns: a LASSO-VAR and sentiment approach

Cryptocurrencies have become a trendy topic recently, primarily due to their disruptive potential and reports of unprecedented returns. Furthermore, social media has garnered attention for its predictive capabilities in various fields, including financial markets and the economy. In this study, we exploit the predictive power of sentiment from Twitter and Reddit, alongside Google Trends indexes, to forecast log returns for 10 cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Binance Coin, Litecoin, Enjin Coin, Horizen, Namecoin, Peercoin and Feathercoin. We evaluate the performance of LASSO Vector Autoregression using daily data from January 2018 to January 2022. In a 30-day recursive forecast, we achieve a mean directional accuracy (MDA) rate of over 50%. Moreover, we observe a significant increase in forecast accuracy in terms of MDA when using sentiment and attention variables as predictors, but only for less capitalized cryptocurrencies. This improvement is not reflected in the RMSE. We also conduct a Granger causality test using post-double LASSO selection for high-dimensional VAR models. Our results suggest that social media sentiment does not Granger-cause cryptocurrencies returns.