Energy Prices and Investor’s Sentiments in the Tehran Stock Exchange: An ARDL Bounds Testing Approach

The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between energy prices (oil and natural gas) and individual investor sentiments on the Tehran stock exchange. Oil and natural gas are two strategic commodities among the world’s most important energy sources. Energy price fluctuations, directly and indirectly, affect the economy and financial markets, especially those oil-exporting and importing countries. We monthly examined the relationships between energy prices and investor sentiment using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique from 2010 to 2020. The results showed that crude oil prices positively affect investor sentiment both in the long and short run, which is consistent with the oil-exporting structure of the Iranian economy. Moreover, the results demonstrated neither a short-run nor a long-run association between gas prices and investor sentiment. The study’s findings suggest that oil prices could be used to predict investor sentiments and optimize an investor’s portfolio.