Betting on bitcoin: a profitable trading between directional and shielding strategies

In this paper, we come up with an original trading strategy on Bitcoins. The methodology we propose is profit-oriented, and it is based on buying or selling the so-called Contracts for Difference, so that the investor’s gain, assessed at a given future time t, is obtained as the difference between the predicted Bitcoin price and an apt threshold. Starting from some empirical findings, and passing through the specification of a suitable theoretical model for the Bitcoin price process, we are able to provide possible investment scenarios, thanks to the use of a Recurrent Neural Network with a Long Short-Term Memory for predicting purposes.