Dynamical mechanism of two-phase phenomena in financial markets

Two-phase behavior of the Korean treasury bond (KTB) futures in the Korean exchange market is investigated in this study. To show that the two-phase phenomena are due to heavy-tailed behavior of distribution of price returns, actual data from the KTB futures market with shuffled data and a generated time series are examined according to the Brownian process. In addition, we study the correlation inherent in the KTB futures and its Brownian walk, describing the extent to which the volatility clustering plays a crucial role in equilibrium and nonequilibrium states of financial markets. It is shown that the two-phase behavior essentially results from heavy-tailed behavior of the distribution of price returns. This two-phase behavior does not appear to be relevant to volatility clustering.     

Understanding the source of multifractality in financial markets

In this paper, we use the generalized Hurst exponent approach to study the multi-scaling behavior of different financial time series. We show that this approach is robust and powerful in detecting different types of multi-scaling. We observe a puzzling phenomenon where an apparent increase in multifractality is measured in time series generated from shuffled returns, where all time-correlations are destroyed, while the return distributions are conserved. This effect is robust and it is reproduced in several real financial data including stock market indices, exchange rates and interest rates. In order to understand the origin of this effect we investigate different simulated time series by means of the Markov switching multifractal model, autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average processes with stable innovations, fractional Brownian motion and Levy flights. Overall we conclude that the multifractality observed in financial time series is mainly a consequence of the characteristic fat-tailed distribution of the returns and time-correlations have the effect to decrease the measured multifractality.     

Self-organized model of cascade spreading

We study simultaneous price drops of real stocks and show that for high drop thresholds they follow a power-law distribution. To reproduce these collective downturns, we propose a minimal self-organized model of cascade spreading based on a probabilistic response of the system elements to stress conditions. This model is solvable using the theory of branching processes and the mean-field approximation. For a wide range of parameters, the system is in a critical state and displays a power-law cascade-size distribution similar to the empirically observed one. We further generalize the model to reproduce volatility clustering and other observed properties of real stocks.     

A Locally Both Leptokurtic and Fat-Tailed Distribution with Application in a Bayesian Stochastic Volatility Model

In the paper, we begin with introducing a novel scale mixture of normal distribution such that its leptokurticity and fat-tailedness are only local, with this “locality” being separately controlled by two censoring parameters. This new, locally leptokurtic and fat-tailed (LLFT) distribution makes a viable alternative for other, globally leptokurtic, fat-tailed and symmetric distributions, typically entertained in financial volatility modelling. Then, we incorporate the LLFT distribution into a basic stochastic volatility (SV) model to yield a flexible alternative for common heavy-tailed SV models. For the resulting LLFT-SV model, we develop a Bayesian statistical framework and effective MCMC methods to enable posterior sampling of the parameters and latent variables. Empirical results indicate the validity of the LLFT-SV specification for modelling both “non-standard” financial time series with repeating zero returns, as well as more “typical” data on the S&P 500 and DAX indices. For the former, the LLFT-SV model is also shown to markedly outperform a common, globally heavy-tailed, t-SV alternative in terms of density forecasting. Applications of the proposed distribution in more advanced SV models seem to be easily attainable.     

Random, but not so much a parameterization for the returns and correlation matrix of financial time series

A parameterization that is a modified version of a previous work is proposed for the returns and correlation matrix of financial time series and its properties are studied. This parameterization allows easy introduction of non-stationarity and it shows several of the characteristics of the true, observed realizations, such as fat tails, volatility clustering, and a spectrum of eigenvalues of the correlation matrix that can be understood as an extension of Random Matrix Theory results. The predicted behavior of this parameterization for the eigenvalues is compared with the eigenvalues of Brazilian assets and it is shown that those predictions fit the data better than Random Matrix Theory.     

Portfolio management under sudden changes in volatility and heterogeneous investment horizons

We analyze the implications for portfolio management of accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity and sudden changes in volatility, based on a sample of weekly data of the Dow Jones Country Titans, the CBT-municipal bond, spot and futures prices of commodities for the period 1992–2005. To that end, we first proceed to utilize the ICSS algorithm to detect long-term volatility shifts, and incorporate that information into PGARCH models fitted to the returns series. At the next stage, we simulate returns series and compute a wavelet-based value at risk, which takes into consideration the investor's time horizon. We repeat the same procedure for artificial data generated from semi-parametric estimates of the distribution functions of returns, which account for fat tails. Our estimation results show that neglecting GARCH effects and volatility shifts may lead to an overestimation of financial risk at different time horizons. In addition, we conclude that investors benefit from holding commodities as their low or even negative correlation with stock and bond indices contribute to portfolio diversification.     

Clustering of volatility in variable diffusion processes

Increments in financial markets have anomalous statistical properties including fat-tailed distributions and volatility clustering (i.e., the autocorrelation functions of return increments decay quickly but those of the squared increments decay slowly). One of the central questions in financial market analysis is whether the nature of the underlying stochastic process can be deduced from these statistical properties. We have shown previously that a class of variable diffusion processes has fat-tailed distributions. Here we show analytically that such models also exhibit volatility clustering. To our knowledge, this is the first case where clustering of volatility is proven analytically in a model.Our results are compatible with the viewpoint that variable diffusion processes are possible models for financial markets.     

Clustering of volatility as a multiscale phenomenon

The dynamics of prices in financial markets has been studied intensively both experimentally (data analysis) and theoretically (models). Nevertheless, a complete stochastic characterization of volatility is still lacking. What is well known is that absolute returns have memory on a long time range, this phenomenon is known as clustering of volatility. In this paper we show that volatility correlations are power-laws with a non-unique scaling exponent. This kind of multiscale phenomenology has some analogies with fully developed turbulence and disordered systems and it is now pointed out for financial series. Starting from historical returns series, we have also derived the volatility distribution, and the results are in agreement with a log-normal shape. In our study, we consider the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), daily composite index closes (January 1966 to June 1998) and the US Dollar/Deutsche Mark (USD-DM) noon buying rates certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (October 1989 to September 1998). Received 1 February 2000     

The non-random walk of stock prices: the long-term correlation between signs and sizes

We investigate the random walk of prices by developing a simple model relating the properties of the signs and absolute values of individual price changes to the diffusion rate (volatility) of prices at longer time scales. We show that this benchmark model is unable to reproduce the diffusion properties of real prices. Specifically, we find that for one hour intervals this model consistently over-predicts the volatility of real price series by about 70%, and that this effect becomes stronger as the length of the intervals increases. By selectively shuffling some components of the data while preserving others we are able to show that this discrepancy is caused by a subtle but long-range non-contemporaneous correlation between the signs and sizes of individual returns. We conjecture that this is related to the long-memory of transaction signs and the need to enforce market efficiency.     

Modelling fluctuations of financial time series: from cascade process to stochastic volatility model

In this paper, we provide a simple, “generic” interpretation of multifractal scaling laws and multiplicative cascade process paradigms in terms of volatility correlations. We show that in this context 1/f power spectra, as recently observed in reference [23], naturally emerge. We then propose a simple solvable “stochastic volatility” model for return fluctuations. This model is able to reproduce most of recent empirical findings concerning financial time series: no correlation between price variations, long-range volatility correlations and multifractal statistics. Moreover, its extension to a multivariate context, in order to model portfolio behavior, is very natural. Comparisons to real data and other models proposed elsewhere are provided. Received 22 May 2000     

Continuous Time Random Walk with Correlated Waiting Times. The Crucial Role of Inter-Trade Times in Volatility Clustering

In many physical, social, and economic phenomena, we observe changes in a studied quantity only in discrete, irregularly distributed points in time. The stochastic process usually applied to describe this kind of variable is the continuous-time random walk (CTRW). Despite the popularity of these types of stochastic processes and strong empirical motivation, models with a long-term memory within the sequence of time intervals between observations are rare in the physics literature. Here, we fill this gap by introducing a new family of CTRWs. The memory is introduced to the model by assuming that many consecutive time intervals can be the same. Surprisingly, in this process we can observe a slowly decaying nonlinear autocorrelation function without a fat-tailed distribution of time intervals. Our model, applied to high-frequency stock market data, can successfully describe the slope of decay of the nonlinear autocorrelation function of stock market returns. We achieve this result without imposing any dependence between consecutive price changes. This proves the crucial role of inter-event times in the volatility clustering phenomenon observed in all stock markets.     

Volatility clustering and scaling for financial time series due to attractor bubbling

A microscopic model of financial markets is considered, consisting of many interacting agents (spins) with global coupling and discrete-time heat bath dynamics, similar to random Ising systems. The interactions between agents change randomly in time. In the thermodynamic limit, the obtained time series of price returns show chaotic bursts resulting from the emergence of attractor bubbling or on-off intermittency, resembling the empirical financial time series with volatility clustering. For a proper choice of the model parameters, the probability distributions of returns exhibit power-law tails with scaling exponents close to the empirical ones.     

Multiscaling and clustering of volatility

The dynamics of prices in stock markets has been studied intensively both experimentally (data analysis) and theoretically (models). Nevertheless, while the distribution of returns of the most important indices is known to be a truncated Lévy, the behaviour of volatility correlations is still poorly understood. What is well known is that absolute returns have memory on a long time range, this phenomenon is known in financial literature as clustering of volatility. In this paper we show that volatility correlations are power laws with a non-unique scaling exponent. This kind of multiscale phenomenology is known to be relevant in fully developed turbulence and in disordered systems and it is pointed out here for the first time for a financial series. In our study we consider the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) daily index, from January 1966 to June 1998, for a total of 8180 working days.     

A Markov model of financial returns

We address the general problem of how to quantify the kinematics of time series with stationary first moments but having non stationary multifractal long-range correlated second moments. We show that a Markov process is sufficient to model important aspects of the multifractality observed in financial time series and propose a kinematic model of price fluctuations. We test the proposed model by analyzing index closing prices of the New York Stock Exchange and the DEM/USD tick-by-tick exchange rates obtained from Reuters EFX. We show that the model captures the characteristic features observed in actual financial time series, including volatility clustering, time scaling and fat tails in the probability density functions, power-law behavior of volatility correlations and, most importantly, the observed nonuniversal multifractal singularity spectrum. Motivated by our finding of strong agreement between the model and the data, we argue that at least two independent stochastic Gaussian variables are required to adequately model price fluctuations.     

Baldovin-Stella stochastic volatility process and Wiener process mixtures

Starting from inhomogeneous time scaling and linear decorrelation between successive price returns, Baldovin and Stella recently proposed a powerful and consistent way to build a model describing the time evolution of a financial index. We first make it fully explicit by using Student distributions instead of power law-truncated Lévy distributions and show that the analytic tractability of the model extends to the larger class of symmetric generalized hyperbolic distributions and provide a full computation of their multivariate characteristic functions; more generally, we show that the stochastic processes arising in this framework are representable as mixtures of Wiener processes. The basic Baldovin and Stella model, while mimicking well volatility relaxation phenomena such as the Omori law, fails to reproduce other stylized facts such as the leverage effect or some time reversal asymmetries. We discuss how to modify the dynamics of this process in order to reproduce real data more accurately.     

Statistical distribution and time correlation of stock returns runs

In this paper, we focus on the statistical features and time correlation of runs which is defined as a sequence of consecutive gain/loss (rise/fall) stock returns. By studying daily data of the Dow Jones industrial average (DJIA), we get the following points: firstly, the distribution of length and magnitude of stock returns runs both follow an exponential law; secondly, runs length do lack significant time correlation, while runs magnitude exhibit a slow decay of time correlation with long persistence up to several months, which implies existence of volatility clustering. We expect the above properties may add new members to the family of stylized facts about stock returns.     

Fluctuation behaviors of financial time series by a stochastic Ising system on a Sierpinski carpet lattice

We develop a financial market model using an Ising spin system on a Sierpinski carpet lattice that breaks the equal status of each spin. To study the fluctuation behavior of the financial model, we present numerical research based on Monte Carlo simulation in conjunction with the statistical analysis and multifractal analysis of the financial time series. We extract the multifractal spectra by selecting various lattice size values of the Sierpinski carpet, and the inverse temperature of the Ising dynamic system. We also investigate the statistical fluctuation behavior, the time-varying volatility clustering, and the multifractality of returns for the indices SSE, SZSE, DJIA, IXIC, S&P500, HSI, N225, and for the simulation data derived from the Ising model on the Sierpinski carpet lattice. A numerical study of the model’s dynamical properties reveals that this financial model reproduces important features of the empirical data.     

The role of communication and imitation in limit order markets

In this paper we develop an order driver market model with heterogeneous traders that imitate each other on different network structures. We assess how imitations among otherway noise traders, can give rise to well known stylized facts such as fat tails and volatility clustering. We examine the impact of communication and imitation on the statistical properties of prices and order flows when changing the networks’ structure, and show that the imitation of a given, fixed agent, called “guru", can generate clustering of volatility in the model. We also find a positive correlation between volatility and bid-ask spread, and between fat-tailed fluctuations in asset prices and gap sizes in the order book.