Commodity and resource ETF trading patterns during the financial crisis |
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| Authors: | Torsten Heinrich |
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| Affiliation: | University of Bremen, Department of Business Studies & Economics, Institute for institutional and Innovation Economics (IINO), Bremen, Germany |
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| Abstract: | This study estimates the parameters of a power law fit of the distribution of log returns of exchange traded funds (ETFs) before, during, and after the recent financial crisis. It is found, that there is considerable variation both between ETFs and between calm and turbulent phases. Exponents of the daily log return distribution are estimated to lie mostly between 3.0 and 5.0 depending on the ETF. In minute‐by‐minute, trading data much lower power law exponents have been found concentrating between 3.0 and 4.0 and sometimes dropping to values close to or below 3.0. Further, there is evidence for changes in the distribution during times of turbulence (value of the exponent, improvement in the goodness of fit measures of the distribution). It can be hypothesized that effects such as, infinite variance (for α < 3) or changes in the form of the distribution can occur, in turn affecting the predictability of the system which has implications for the possibility to control or regulate financial markets under such conditions. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 73–83, 2016 |
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| Keywords: | ETF power law distributions commodity prices 2008 financial crisis inverse cubic law of price changes |
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