We present a symmetry analysis of the distribution of variations of different financial indices, by means of a statistical procedure developed by the authors based on a symmetry statistic by Einmahl and Mckeague. We applied this statistical methodology to financial uninterrupted daily trends returns and to other derived observable. In our opinion, to study distributional symmetry, trends returns offer more advantages than the commonly used daily financial returns; the two most important being: 1) Trends returns involve sampling over different time scales and 2) By construction, this variable time series contains practically the same number of non-negative and negative entry values. We also show that these time multi-scale returns display distributional bi-modality. Daily financial indices analyzed in this work, are the Mexican IPC, the American DJIA, DAX from Germany and the Japanese Market index Nikkei, covering a time period from 11-08-1991 to 06-30-2017. We show that, at the time scale resolution and significance considered in this paper, it is almost always feasible to find an interval of possible symmetry points containing one most plausible symmetry point denoted by C. Finally, we study the temporal evolution of C showing that this point is seldom zero and responds with sensitivity to extreme market events.
We analyzed cross-correlations between price fluctuations of global financial indices (20 daily stock indices over the world) and local indices (daily indices of 200 companies in the Korean stock market) by using random matrix theory (RMT). We compared eigenvalues and components of the largest and the second largest eigenvectors of the cross-correlation matrix before, during, and after the global financial the crisis in the year 2008. We find that the majority of its eigenvalues fall within the RMT bounds [λ_, λ+], where λ_- and λ_+ are the lower and the upper bounds of the eigenvalues of rand…
A non-parametric method for ranking stock indices according to their mutual causal influences is presented. Under the assumption that indices reflect the underlying economy of a country, such a ranking indicates which countries exert the most economic influence in an examined subset of the global economy. The proposed method represents the indices as nodes in a directed graph, where the edges' weights are estimates of the pair-wise causal influences, quantified using the directed information functional. This method facilitates using a relatively small number of samples from each index. The ind…
In financial time series there are periods in which the value increases or decreases monotonically. We call those periods elemental trends and study the probability distribution of their duration for the indices DJIA, NASDAQ and IPC. It is found that the trend duration distribution often differs from the one expected under no memory. The expected and observed distributions are compared by means of the Anderson-Darling test.
We study the distribution of fluctuations over a time scale $Δt$ (i.e., the returns) of the S&P 500 index by analyzing three distinct databases. Database (i) contains approximately 1 million records sampled at 1 min intervals for the 13-year period 1984-1996, database (ii) contains 8686 daily records for the 35-year period 1962-1996, and database (iii) contains 852 monthly records for the 71-year period 1926-1996. We compute the probability distributions of returns over a time scale $Δt$, where $Δt$ varies approximately over a factor of 10^4 - from 1 min up to more than 1 month. We find that t…
Using a time-varying approach, this paper examines the dynamics of volatility in the REIT sector. The results highlight the attractiveness and suitability of using GARCH based approaches in the modeling of daily REIT volatility. The paper examines the influencing factors on REIT volatility, documenting the return and volatility linkages between REIT sub-sectors and also examines the influence of other US equity series. The results contrast with previous studies of monthly REIT volatility. Linkages within the REIT sector and with related sectors such as value stocks are diminished, while the ge…
Modeling stock returns is not a new task for mathematicians, investors, and portfolio managers, but it remains a difficult objective due to the ebb and flow of stock markets. One common solution is to approximate the distribution of stock returns with a normal distribution. However, normal distributions place infinitesimal probabilities on extreme outliers, but these outliers are of particular importance in the practice of investing. In this paper, we investigate the normality of the distribution of daily returns of major stock market indices. We find that the normal distribution is not a good…
We study the asymptotic normality of two feasible estimators of the integrated volatility of volatility based on the Fourier methodology, which does not require the pre-estimation of the spot volatility. We show that the bias-corrected estimator reaches the optimal rate $n^{1/4}$, while the estimator without bias-correction has a slower convergence rate and a smaller asymptotic variance. Additionally, we provide simulation results that support the theoretical asymptotic distribution of the rate-efficient estimator and show the accuracy of the latter in comparison with a rate-optimal estimator …
The gain-loss asymmetry, observed in the inverse statistics of stock indices is present for logarithmic return levels that are over $2\%$, and it is the result of the non-Pearson type auto-correlations in the index. These non-Pearson type correlations can be viewed also as functionally dependent daily volatilities, extending for a finite time interval. A generalized time-window shuffling method is used to show the existence of such auto-correlations. Their characteristic time-scale proves to be smaller (less than $25$ trading days) than what was previously believed. It is also found that this …
Over the last two decades, financial systems have been studied and analysed from the perspective of complex networks, where the nodes and edges in the network represent the various financial components and the strengths of correlations between them. Here, we adopt a similar network-based approach to analyse the daily closing prices of 69 global financial market indices across 65 countries over a period of 2000-2014. We study the correlations among the indices by constructing threshold networks superimposed over minimum spanning trees at different time frames. We investigate the effect of criti…
This case study tests the possibility of prediction for "success" (or "winner") components of four stock & shares market indices in a time period of three years from 02-Jul-2009 to 29-Jun-2012.We compare their performance ain two time frames: initial frame three months at the beginning (02/06/2009-30/09/2009) and the final three month frame (02/04/2012-29/06/2012). To label the components, average price ratio between two time frames in descending order is computed. The average price ratio is defined as the ratio between the mean prices of the beginning and final time period. The "winner" compo…
The cross-correlation matrix of daily returns of stock market indices in a diverse set of 37 countries worldwide was analyzed. Comparison of the spectrum of this matrix with predictions of random matrix theory provides an empirical evidence of strong interactions between individual economies, as manifested by three largest eigenvalues and the corresponding set of stable, non-random eigenvectors. The observed correlation structure is robust with respect to changes in the time horizon of returns ranging from 1 to 10 trading days, and to replacing individual returns with just their signs. This la…
To take into account the temporal dimension of uncertainty in stock markets, this paper introduces a cross-sectional estimation of stock market volatility based on the intrinsic entropy model. The proposed cross-sectional intrinsic entropy (CSIE) is defined and computed as a daily volatility estimate for the entire market, grounded on the daily traded prices: open, high, low, and close prices (OHLC), along with the daily traded volume for all symbols listed on The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and The National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ). We perform a compa…
The so-called Benford's laws are of frequent use in order to observe anomalies and regularities in data sets, in particular, in election results and financial statements. Yet, basic financial market indices have not been much studied, if studied at all, within such a perspective. This paper presents features in the distributions of S\&P500 daily closing values and the corresponding daily log returns over a long time interval, [03/01/1950 - 22/08/2014], amounting to 16265 data points. We address the frequencies of the first, second, and first two significant digits counts and explore the confor…
We study the long-term memory in diverse stock market indices and foreign exchange rates using the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis(DFA). For all daily and high-frequency market data studied, no significant long-term memory property is detected in the return series, while a strong long-term memory property is found in the volatility time series. The possible causes of the long-term memory property are investigated using the return data filtered by the AR(1) model, reflecting the short-term memory property, and the GARCH(1,1) model, reflecting the volatility clustering property, respectively. Not…
We use Random Matrix Theory (RMT) and information theory to analyze the correlations and flow of information between 64,939 news from The New York Times and 40 world financial indices during 10 months along the period 2015-2016. The set of news was quantified and transformed into daily polarity time series using tools from sentiment analysis. Results from RMT shows that a common factor lead the world indices and news, and even share the same dynamics. Furthermore, the global correlation structure has found preserved when adding white noise, which indicate that correlations are not due to sampl…
We investigate the large-volatility dynamics in financial markets, based on the minute-to-minute and daily data of the Chinese Indices and German DAX. The dynamic relaxation both before and after large volatilities is characterized by a power law, and the exponents $p_\pm$ usually vary with the strength of the large volatilities. The large-volatility dynamics is time-reversal symmetric at the time scale in minutes, while asymmetric at the daily time scale. Careful analysis reveals that the time-reversal asymmetry is mainly induced by exogenous events. It is also the exogenous events which driv…
In this paper we have analyzed scaling properties of time series of stock market indices (SMIs) of developing economies of Western Balkans, and have compared the results we have obtained with the results from more developed economies. We have used three different techniques of data analysis to obtain and verify our findings: Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) method, Detrended Moving Average (DMA) method, and Wavelet Transformation (WT) analysis. We have found scaling behavior in all SMI data sets that we have analyzed. The scaling of our SMI series changes from long-range correlated to slig…
2T-POT Hawkes model for left- and right-tail conditional quantile forecasts of financial log-returns: out-of-sample comparison of conditional EVT models
We investigate statistical properties of daily international market indices of seven countries, and high-frequency $S&P500$ and KOSDAQ data, by using the detrended fluctuation method and the surrogate test. We have found that the returns of international stock market indices of seven countries follow a universal power-law distribution with an exponent of $ζ\approx 3$, while the Korean stock market follows an exponential distribution with an exponent of $β\approx 0.7$. The Hurst exponent analysis of the original return, and its magnitude and sign series, reveal that the long-term-memory propert…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of the social media data in predicting the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) variables for the first time. We consider the closing price and daily return of three different stocks for this investigation. We collected our social media data from Sahamyab.com/stocktwits for about three months. To extract information from online comments, we propose a hybrid sentiment analysis approach that combines lexicon-based and learning-based methods. Since lexicons that are available for the Persian language are not practical for sentiment analysis in the stock market doma…
We empirically analyze the scaling properties of daily Foreign Exchange rates, Stock Market indices and Bond futures across different financial markets. We study the scaling behaviour of the time series by using a generalized Hurst exponent approach. We verify the robustness of this approach and we compare the results with the scaling properties in the frequency-domain. We find evidence of deviations from the pure Brownian motion behavior. We show that these deviations are associated with characteristics of the specific markets and they can be, therefore, used to distinguish the different degr…
With the daily and minutely data of the German DAX and Chinese indices, we investigate how the return-volatility correlation originates in financial dynamics. Based on a retarded volatility model, we may eliminate or generate the return-volatility correlation of the time series, while other characteristics, such as the probability distribution of returns and long-range time-correlation of volatilities etc., remain essentially unchanged. This suggests that the leverage effect or anti-leverage effect in financial markets arises from a kind of feedback return-volatility interactions, rather than …
In this paper, we quantify the statistical coherence between financial time series by means of the Renyi entropy. With the help of Campbell's coding theorem we show that the Renyi entropy selectively emphasizes only certain sectors of the underlying empirical distribution while strongly suppressing others. This accentuation is controlled with Renyi's parameter q. To tackle the issue of the information flow between time series we formulate the concept of Renyi's transfer entropy as a measure of information that is transferred only between certain parts of underlying distributions. This is parti…
Stylized facts of empirical assets log-returns $Z$ include the existence of (semi) heavy tailed distributions $f_Z(z)$ and a non-linear spectrum of Hurst exponents $τ(β)$. Empirical data considered are daily prices of 10 large indices from 01/01/1990 to 12/31/2004. We propose a stylized model of price dynamics which is driven by expectations. The model is a multiplicative random process with a stochastic, state-dependent growth rate which establishes a negative feedback component in the price dynamics. This 0-order model implies that the distribution of log-returns is Laplacian $f_Z(z) \sim \e…
We test for departures from normal and independent and identically distributed (NIID) returns, when returns under the alternative hypothesis are self-affine. Self-affine returns are either fractionally integrated and long-range dependent, or drawn randomly from an L-stable distribution with infinite higher-order moments. The finite sample performance of estimators of the two forms of self-affinity is explored in a simulation study which demonstrates that, unlike rescaled range analysis and other conventional estimation methods, the variant of fluctuation analysis that considers finite sample m…
The time-varying kernel density estimation relies on two free parameters: the bandwidth and the discount factor. We propose to select these parameters so as to minimize a criterion consistent with the traditional requirements of the validation of a probability density forecast. These requirements are both the uniformity and the independence of the so-called probability integral transforms, which are the forecast time-varying cumulated distributions applied to the observations. We thus build a new numerical criterion incorporating both the uniformity and independence properties by the mean of a…
We examine how the most prevalent stochastic properties of key financial time series have been affected during the recent financial crises. In particular we focus on changes associated with the remarkable economic events of the last two decades in the mean and volatility dynamics, including the underlying volatility persistence and volatility spillovers structure. Using daily data from several key stock market indices we find that stock market returns exhibit time varying persistence in their corresponding conditional variances. Furthermore, the results of our bivariate GARCH models show the e…
Performance forecasting is an age-old problem in economics and finance. Recently, developments in machine learning and neural networks have given rise to non-linear time series models that provide modern and promising alternatives to traditional methods of analysis. In this paper, we present an ensemble of independent and parallel long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks for the prediction of stock price movement. LSTMs have been shown to be especially suited for time series data due to their ability to incorporate past information, while neural network ensembles have been found to reduce…
Financial markets across all asset classes are known to exhibit trends. These trends have been exploited by traders for decades. Here, we empirically measure when trends revert, based on 30 years of daily futures prices for equity indices, interest rates, currencies and commodities. We find that trends tend to revert once they reach a critical level of statistical significance. Based on polynomial regression, we carefully measure this critical level. We find that it is universal across asset classes and has a universal scaling behavior, as the trend's time horizon runs from a few days to sever…
