Abstract:

The CEE banking sector is becoming the object of special attention of researchers in view of the possible impact of both the pandemic period and Russia's aggression against Ukraine. The impact of these two phenomena had influenced crucially the financial health of banks in the region. We can even talk about deeper reasons for the banking sector's lagging behind a number of other industries. At the same time, on the basis of machine learning methods, it was possible to prove the predictability of market entities. If the traditional Fama-French analysis does not allow asserting the existence of long-term strategies for such business in CEE, the rejection of linearity and the use of neural networks show the presence of such strategies. On the other hand, representatives of different countries in this sector differ significantly both in terms of risk and financial condition, which is clearly indicated by the existence of three distinct clusters based on accounting data.