Codebase:

https://github.com/jed-gore/stock_betas/blob/main/README.md

I recall a couple years ago I was looking at SQ and how much the stock traded with bitcoin.

Apparently they clear bitcoin trades? Page 11 of the 2022 10K: “Customers can also use Cash App to invest their funds in U.S. listed stocks and exchange-traded funds (“ETFs”) or buy and sell bitcoin”

Now that bitcoin has pulled back a bit (?) I was curious what SQ (Block) trades with now.

To that end I set up an objects file with a StockData class which does some data pulls using yfinance and munges stock returns into betas and R2 with a rolling window of 60 90 and 252 days.

The idea is to see how SQ correlates with different ETF / stocks over time to try to tease out what drives the stock today.

First I set up a list of peers:

And then plot the relative return:<>br As you can see, SQ had a nice bounce back in the heady bitcoin days but has underperformed its peers since.

I then used a list of ETF and single stocks as “factors” in a way to see if SQ still correlated with Bitcoin (using MSTR as a proxy) or if it traded with Oil (USO) or retail (AMZN) etc.

Or a better view is in a bar plot:

You can see how the R2 with GPN has been increasing over the past three windows 252, 90, and 60 day rolling.
To me, this suggests SQ is starting to trade more like a processor and less like a bitcoin stock, as you might imagine it would post the crypto selloff of 2022.