Recent studies show that a negative shock in stock prices will generate more volatility than a positive shock of similar magnitude. The aim of this paper is to appraise the hypothesis under which the conditional mean and the conditional variance of stock returns are asymmetric functions of past information. We compare the results for the Portuguese Stock Market Index PSI 20 with six other Stock Market Indices, namely the S&P 500, FTSE100, DAX 30, CAC 40, ASE 20, and IBEX 35. In order to assess asymmetric volatility we use autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity specifications known as TARCH and EGARCH. We also test for asymmetry after controlling for the effect of macroeconomic factors on stock market returns using TAR and M-TAR specifications within a VAR framework. Our results show that the conditional variance is an asymmetric function of past innovations raising proportionately more during market declines, a phenomenon known as the leverage effect. However, when we control for the effect of changes in macroeconomic variables, we find no significant evidence of asymmetric behaviour of the stock market returns. There are some signs that the Portuguese Stock Market tends to show somewhat less market efficiency than other markets since the effect of the shocks appear to take a longer time to dissipate.
Volatility dynamics of wavelet - filtered stock price time series is studied. Using the universal thresholding method of wavelet filtering and a principle of minimal linear autocorrelation of noise component we find that the quantitative characteristics of volatility dynamics of denoised series are noticeably different from those of the raw data and the noise.
We develop a behavioral model for liquidity and volatility based on empirical regularities in trading order flow in the London Stock Exchange. This can be viewed as a very simple agent based model in which all components of the model are validated against real data. Our empirical studies of order flow uncover several interesting regularities in the way trading orders are placed and cancelled. The resulting simple model of order flow is used to simulate price formation under a continuous double auction, and the statistical properties of the resulting simulated sequence of prices are compared to…
The Mike-Farmer (MF) model was constructed empirically based on the continuous double auction mechanism in an order-driven market, which can successfully reproduce the cubic law of returns and the diffusive behavior of stock prices at the transaction level. However, the volatility (defined by absolute return) in the MF model does not show sound long memory. We propose a modified version of the MF model by including a new ingredient, that is, long memory in the aggressiveness (quantified by the relative prices) of incoming orders, which is an important stylized fact identified by analyzing the …
One of the major issues studied in finance that has always intrigued, both scholars and practitioners, and to which no unified theory has yet been discovered, is the reason why prices move over time. Since there are several well-known traditional techniques in the literature to measure stock market volatility, a central point in this debate that constitutes the actual scope of this paper is to compare this common approach in which we discuss such popular techniques as the standard deviation and an innovative methodology based on Econophysics. In our study, we use the concept of Tsallis entropy…
Long memory and volatility clustering are two stylized facts frequently related to financial markets. Traditionally, these phenomena have been studied based on conditionally heteroscedastic models like ARCH, GARCH, IGARCH and FIGARCH, inter alia. One advantage of these models is their ability to capture nonlinear dynamics. Another interesting manner to study the volatility phenomena is by using measures based on the concept of entropy. In this paper we investigate the long memory and volatility clustering for the SP 500, NASDAQ 100 and Stoxx 50 indexes in order to compare the US and European M…
We investigate the probability distribution of the volatility return intervals $τ$ for the Chinese stock market. We rescale both the probability distribution $P_{q}(τ)$ and the volatility return intervals $τ$ as $P_{q}(τ)=1/\barτ f(τ/\barτ)$ to obtain a uniform scaling curve for different threshold value $q$. The scaling curve can be well fitted by the stretched exponential function $f(x) \sim e^{-αx^γ}$, which suggests memory exists in $τ$. To demonstrate the memory effect, we investigate the conditional probability distribution $P_{q} (τ|τ_{0})$, the mean conditional interval $<τ|τ_{0}>$ and…
Bid-ask spread is taken as an important measure of the financial market liquidity. In this article, we study the dynamics of the spread return and the spread volatility of four liquid stocks in the Chinese stock market, including the memory effect and the multifractal nature. By investigating the autocorrelation function and the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), we find that the spread return is lack of long-range memory, while the spread volatility is long-range time correlated. Moreover, by applying the Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MF-DFA), the spread return is observed t…
The aim of this paper is to compare statistical properties of stock price indices in periods of booms with those in periods of stagnations. We use the daily data of the four stock price indices in the major stock markets in the world: (i) the Nikkei 225 index (Nikkei 225) from January 4, 1975 to August 18, 2004, of (ii) the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) from January 2, 1946 to August 18, 2004, of (iii) Standard and Poor's 500 index (SP500) from November 22, 1982 to August 18, 2004, and of (iii) the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index (FT 100) from April 2, 1984 to August 18, 2004. W…
We examine volatility of an Indian stock market in terms of aspects like participation, synchronization of stocks and quantification of volatility using the random matrix approach. Volatility pattern of the market is found using the BSE index for the three-year period 2000-2002. Random matrix analysis is carried out using daily returns of 70 stocks for several time windows of 85 days in 2001 to (i) do a brief comparative analysis with statistics of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the matrix C of correlations between price fluctuations, in time regimes of different volatilities. While a bulk of…
We shortly review the statistical properties of the escape times, or hitting times, for stock price returns by using different models which describe the stock market evolution. We compare the probability function (PF) of these escape times with that obtained from real market data. Afterwards we analyze in detail the effect both of noise and different initial conditions on the escape time in a market model with stochastic volatility and a cubic nonlinearity. For this model we compare the PF of the stock price returns, the PF of the volatility and the return correlation with the same statistical…
In order to understand the origin of stock price jumps, we cross-correlate high-frequency time series of stock returns with different news feeds. We find that neither idiosyncratic news nor market wide news can explain the frequency and amplitude of price jumps. We find that the volatility patterns around jumps and around news are quite different: jumps are followed by increased volatility, whereas news tend on average to be followed by lower volatility levels. The shape of the volatility relaxation is also markedly different in the two cases. Finally, we provide direct evidence that large tra…
The statistical properties of the return intervals $τ_q$ between successive 1-min volatilities of 30 liquid Chinese stocks exceeding a certain threshold $q$ are carefully studied. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test shows that 12 stocks exhibit scaling behaviors in the distributions of $τ_q$ for different thresholds $q$. Furthermore, the KS test and weighted KS test shows that the scaled return interval distributions of 6 stocks (out of the 12 stocks) can be nicely fitted by a stretched exponential function $f(τ/\barτ)\sim e^{- α(τ/\barτ)^γ}$ with $γ\approx0.31$ under the significance level of 5%…
The distribution of the return intervals $τ$ between volatilities above a threshold $q$ for financial records has been approximated by a scaling behavior. To explore how accurate is the scaling and therefore understand the underlined non-linear mechanism, we investigate intraday datasets of 500 stocks which consist of the Standard & Poor's 500 index. We show that the cumulative distribution of return intervals has systematic deviations from scaling. We support this finding by studying the m-th moment $μ_m \equiv <(τ/<τ>)^m>^{1/m}$, which show a certain trend with the mean interval $<τ>$. We ge…
We study the return interval $τ$ between price volatilities that are above a certain threshold $q$ for 31 intraday datasets, including the Standard & Poor's 500 index and the 30 stocks that form the Dow Jones Industrial index. For different threshold $q$, the probability density function $P_q(τ)$ scales with the mean interval $\barτ$ as $P_q(τ)={\barτ}^{-1}f(τ/\barτ)$, similar to that found in daily volatilities. Since the intraday records have significantly more data points compared to the daily records, we could probe for much higher thresholds $q$ and still obtain good statistics. We find t…
We investigate the time series of the degree of minimum spanning trees obtained by using a correlation based clustering procedure which is starting from (i) asset return and (ii) volatility time series. The minimum spanning tree is obtained at different times by computing correlation among time series over a time window of fixed length $T$. We find that the minimum spanning tree of asset return is characterized by stock degree values, which are more stable in time than the ones obtained by analyzing a minimum spanning tree computed starting from volatility time series. Our analysis also shows …
We present an empirical study of the subordination hypothesis for a stochastic time series of a stock price. The fluctuating rate of trading is identified with the stochastic variance of the stock price, as in the continuous-time random walk (CTRW) framework. The probability distribution of the stock price changes (log-returns) for a given number of trades N is found to be approximately Gaussian. The probability distribution of N for a given time interval Dt is non-Poissonian and has an exponential tail for large N and a sharp cutoff for small N. Combining these two distributions produces a no…
We study the temporal fluctuations in time-dependent stock prices (both individual and composite) as a stochastic phenomenon using general techniques and methods of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. In particular, we analyze stock price fluctuations as a non-Markovian stochastic process using the first-passage statistical concepts of persistence and survival. We report the results of empirical measurements of the normalized $q$-order correlation functions $f_q(t)$, survival probability $S(t)$, and persistence probability $P(t)$ for several stock market dynamical sets. We analyze both minut…
We study the cascading dynamics immediately before and immediately after 219 market shocks. We define the time of a market shock T_{c} to be the time for which the market volatility V(T_{c}) has a peak that exceeds a predetermined threshold. The cascade of high volatility "aftershocks" triggered by the "main shock" is quantitatively similar to earthquakes and solar flares, which have been described by three empirical laws --- the Omori law, the productivity law, and the Bath law. We analyze the most traded 531 stocks in U.S. markets during the two-year period 2001-2002 at the 1-minute time res…
