The canonical econophysics approach to the flash crash of May 6, 2010

Abstract

We carry out a statistical physics analysis of the flash crash of May 6, 2010 using data from the Dow Jones Industrial Average index sampled at a one-minute frequency from September 1, 2009 to May 31, 2010. We evaluate the hypothesis of a non-Gaussian Levy-stable distribution to model the data and pay particular attention to the distribution-tail behavior. We conclude that there is non-Gaussian scaling and thus that the flash crash cannot be considered an anomaly. From the study of tails, we find that the flash crash followed a power-law pattern outside the Levy regime, which was not the inverse cubic law. Finally, we show that the time-dependent variance of the DJIA-index returns, not tracked by the Levy, can be modeled in a straightforward manner by a GARCH (1, 1) process