Co-movement between GCC stock markets and the US stock markets: A wavelet coherence analysis

In this article, the co-movement between GCC and US stock market returns was investigated using the wavelet coherence method. The Dynamic Conditional Correlation GARCH (DCC-GARCH) modelling is then applied on time-varying components in order to provide a point of comparison with the results extracted from wavelet analysis. The investigation was conducted on the weekly stock index prices of two USA stock markets, namely Dow Jones and S&P 500 and six GCC stock markets, namely the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The data were retrieved from Thomson Reuters’s data stream and the sample duration was from 7 January 2007 to 24 June 2018. As a result, a definite co-movement between several GCC stock markets and those of the US stock markets for a long term was found. Moreover, the results also displayed signs of the significant disparity between the co-movements of the stock markets throughout the scales of time during economic decline. This phenomenon was possibly expected during the economic decline, where a significant divergence occurred as opposed to co-movement. The implications of the findings for global investors were considerable due to the indication from long-term co-movement that these investors would not be capable of gaining simultaneous profit from time and portfolio being diversified. In fact, the results showed the major difference in the opportunities for international portfolio diversification throughout these markets in terms of scale and time.