REVISITING GOLD'S SAFE HAVEN STATUS WITH THE UTILIZATION OF THE INDEX OF IMPLIED VOLATILITY AND VALUES OF EXCHANGE TRADED FUNDS

The coronavirus pandemic is a health and economic crisis which has placed an immense strain on the world’s financial system. Hence, amidst the (still ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic, the objective of this work is to investigate the role of gold as as a hedge or safe haven with the use of exchange traded funds. The present work employs the implied volatility index of gold share options (GVZ), the net asset value of the price per share of the US Oil Fund options (USO) and the value of the Currency Share Euro Trust (FXE). The statistical tool utilized is the quantile regressions methodology. Data are daily observations from June 2008 to December 2018.  The empirical results reveal that gold's implied volatility decreases significantly (or it is not statistically different than zero), under changes in the average returns and/or under extreme market declines in FXE and USO. According to the aforementioned findings, gold could be an investment vehicle to serve as a hedge and or a safe haven asset. The present study is the first one to employ quantile regressions (QR) along with gold's implied volatility and the prices of exchange traded funds (ETFs) in order to investigate gold's hedge and/or safe haven properties.