Regional analytics and forecasting for most affected stock markets: The case of GCC stock markets during COVID-19 pandemic

This paper determines the most affected stock market by COVID-19 among GCC stock markets and extracts the factors that increase this effect. Recommendations from the analytics results are studied, which can mitigate the financial impacts by taking the proper actions to reduce them. Despite the actions taken by countries worldwide to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the financial effects are still unidentified. Recently, the spread of the COVID-19 caused a decline in the stock market indicators because most sectors witnessed a recession because of curfews imposed to limit the spread of the virus. Different datasets are collected from the “Trading Economics” website, related to the indicators of COVID-19 and stock markets for each Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country. In addition, constructing visualizations of the most critical factors that support the facts extracted from the correlation analytics results showed that Bahrain was most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with 47,351 confirmed cases per million populations. Moreover, building a forecasting model using Artificial Neural Network to establish how the virus will continue spreading until the end of May 2020. The results showed that the Kuwait stock market was the most affected by the pandemic, with average losses of −0.28. The losses would soon increase in the Bahrain stock market by −0.29, so in the next two months, the losses would be −0.35%, and Bahrain would be the most affected market in GCC.