Looking for a safe haven against American stocks during COVID-19 pandemic

This article aims to find the best safe-haven for stock investors in the American market since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The research period covers March 2020–May 2022. Among the possible alternatives, we analyse the traditional ones: US bonds, gold, and silver, as well as the new ones: stable DeFi and CeFi coins, and most popular cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and Ether. We study quantile coherency between S&P 500 and each asset and the respective conditional correlation. We show that the safe-haven properties of the assets varied over time and that centralized stablecoins could have been used as safe-haven against American stocks during the pandemics. •We analyse safe-haven properties of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and traditional assets.•We apply quantile coherency and dynamic correlation analysis.•Centralized stablecoins could have been used as safe-haven against American stocks during COVID-19 pandemic.