Environmentally clean and dirty energy equities during extraordinary global conditions

In this talk, I focus on linking extraordinary international events to pronounced changes in the equity markets for some of the world’s largest publicly traded suppliers on opposite sides of the global energy mix – oil and environmentally clean energy companies. I will introduce an intuitively appealing non-linear approach to empirically timestamp unexpected and prominent increases and decreases in a time series that arise from a stable environment. I will then explain how this non-linear filter can be applied to a wide range of global indicators relevant to the international energy market. Then, I will use such extraordinary conditions to characterise the performance of oil and environmentally clean energy equities, and their relationships. I will show that jumps in the global stock market, international crude oil market shocks, and the US dollar real effective exchange rate, define the financial landscape during which considerable gains, losses, and instability across both types of energy markets materialise. In contrast, I will also show that major elevated uncertainties related to geo-political risk and climate policy reflect relative stability in the equities of environmentally clean energy and oil companies, implying that both energy assets are potentially lucrative hedging strategies for investors to exploit in such times of remarkable political and policy related turmoil.