Impact of COVID-19 on the Stock Market Performance of Global IT Sector

Predicting return and volatility in the global Capital Market during a pandemic is challenging, and it is more difficult for a specific sector, particularly if that sector has a positive outlook. The goal of this research is to look at the impact of COVID-19 on the mean and volatility of the Information Technology Indexes of the best nine technology-driven countries based on return performance using an econometric GARCH model that is widely used. The daily returns of information technology indexes are evaluated for the same from November 2018 to February 2021. Data is taken from Yahoo Finance for CAC Tech (France), DAX Tech (Germany), FTSE All Tech (UK), KOPSI 200 IT (Korea), NIFTY IT (India), S&P 500 IT (US), S&P TSX (Canada), SSE_IT (China) and TOPIX17 (Japan). The results show daily positive mean returns for 8 countries’ IT Indices and further, an uptrend in mean daily returns is observed in the crisis period for 6 countries’ IT Indices. The exogenous variable COVID-19 which was taken as a regressor for the GARCH model was found to be positively significant for IT indices of all the countries. The overall results confirm the presence of the mean-reverting phenomenon for IT indices of all the countries.