Indication of multiscaling in the volatility return intervals of stock markets

Fengzhong Wang, Kazuko Yamasaki, Shlomo Havlin, H. Eugene Stanley

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56 Scopus citations

Abstract

The distribution of the return intervals τ between price volatilities above a threshold height q for financial records has been approximated by a scaling behavior. To explore how accurate is the scaling and therefore understand the underlined nonlinear mechanism, we investigate intraday data sets of 500 stocks which consist of 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 μm (τ/ τ) m 1/m, which show a certain trend with the mean interval τ. We generate surrogate records using the Schreiber method, and find that their cumulative distributions almost collapse to a single curve and moments are almost constant for most ranges of τ. Those substantial differences suggest that nonlinear correlations in the original volatility sequence account for the deviations from a single scaling law. We also find that the original and surrogate records exhibit slight tendencies for short and long τ, due to the discreteness and finite size effects of the records, respectively. To avoid as possible those effects for testing the multiscaling behavior, we investigate the moments in the range 10< τ ≤100, and find that the exponent α from the power law fitting μm ∼ τ α has a narrow distribution around α0 which depends on m for the 500 stocks. The distribution of α for the surrogate records are very narrow and centered around α=0. This suggests that the return interval distribution exhibits multiscaling behavior due to the nonlinear correlations in the original volatility.

Original languageEnglish
Article number016109
JournalPhysical Review E
Volume77
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 29 Jan 2008

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