The Volatility of Dow Jones Conventional and Islamic Indices: Does Covid-19 Pandemic Matter?

The pandemic of Covid-19 has affected the equity market to become highly volatile. This study aims to investigate the Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) family models in forecasting the Dow Jones conventional and Islamic indices, and to examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on both the Dow Jones conventional and Islamic indices. This study employs a time series of daily data over the period 2013 to 2021. The results show that the GARCH, TGARCH and EGARCH were the best models in predicting the Dow Jones indices. However, when the data is divided into sub-period, it is found that only TGARCH is the best model in forecasting Dow Jones indices. Interestingly, the findings show that bad and good news can significantly affect the conditional volatility of all Dow Jones conventional and Islamic indices returns. The findings of this study conclude that securities regulation department in the United States of America had captured the influence of corona pandemic. This is mainly because of the strong relationship between the fluctuation of the stock prices and the pandemic itself. Accordingly, the international investors should pay attention to prediction models which offers to utilize these results to adjust their investment counter position for the future volatility and employ hedging strategies during the corona pandemic.