COVID-19 pandemic and stability of stock market—A sectoral approach

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to be the most important phenomenon observed from March 2020 in virtually all countries of the world. The necessity to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and keep health care systems efficient resulted in the forced, drastic limitation of economic activity. Many service sectors were hit particularly hard with this but industry and agriculture were also affected. In particular, the pandemic substantially influenced financial markets and we can observe that some markets or instruments vary in stability since they have been affected in the different degree. In the paper, we present the problem of stability of stock markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the low number of works related to CEE countries during the pandemic, we analyze the Warsaw Stock Exchange, which is one of the most important markets in the CEE. Our main goal was to find how various industries represented by stock market indices have reacted to the COVID-19 shock and consequently which sectors turned out to keep stability and remained resistant to the pandemic. In our investigation, we use two clustering methods: the K-means and the Ward techniques with the criterion of maximizing the silhouette coefficient and six indicators describing stability in terms of profitability, volume, overbought/oversold conditions and volatility. The results of the research present that during the pandemic it was possible to identify 5 clusters of sector indices in the short term and 4 in the medium term. We found that the composition of the clusters is quite stable over time and that none of the obtained clusters can be univocally considered the most or the least stable taking into account all the analyzed indicators. However, we showed that the obtained clusters have different stability origins, i.e. they vary from each other in terms of the investigated indicators of stability.