Nonextensive statistical features of the Polish stock market fluctuations

The statistics of return distributions on various time scales constitutes one of the most informative characteristics of the financial dynamics. Here we present a systematic study of such characteristics for the Polish stock market index WIG20 over the period 04.01.1999 - 31.10.2005 for the time lags ranging from one minute up to one hour. This market is commonly classified as emerging. Still on the shortest time scales studied we find that the tails of the return distributions are consistent with the inverse cubic power-law, as identified previously for majority of the mature markets. Within the time scales studied a quick and considerable departure from this law towards a Gaussian can however be traced. Interestingly, all the forms of the distributions observed can be comprised by the single $q$-Gaussians which provide a satisfactory and at the same time compact representation of the distribution of return fluctuations over all magnitudes of their variation. The corresponding nonextensivity parameter $q$ is found to systematically decrease when increasing the time scales.Comment: 14 pages. Physica A in prin

Stock market return distributions: from past to present

We show that recent stock market fluctuations are characterized by the cumulative distributions whose tails on short, minute time scales exhibit power scaling with the scaling index alpha > 3 and this index tends to increase quickly with decreasing sampling frequency. Our study is based on high-frequency recordings of the S&P500, DAX and WIG20 indices over the interval May 2004 - May 2006. Our findings suggest that dynamics of the contemporary market may differ from the one observed in the past. This effect indicates a constantly increasing efficiency of world markets.Comment: to appear in Physica

Components of multifractality in high-frequency stock returns

We analyzed multifractal properties of 5-minute stock returns from a period of over two years for 100 highly capitalized American companies. The two sources: fat-tailed probability distributions and nonlinear temporal correlations, vitally contribute to the observed multifractal dynamics of the returns. For majority of the companies the temporal correlations constitute a much more significant related factor, however.Comment: to appear in Physica

Multifractality in the stock market: price increments versus waiting times

By applying the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis to the high-frequency tick-by-tick data from Deutsche B\"orse both in the price and in the time domains, we investigate multifractal properties of the time series of logarithmic price increments and inter-trade intervals of time. We show that both quantities reveal multiscaling and that this result holds across different stocks. The origin of the multifractal character of the corresponding dynamics is, among others, the long-range correlations in price increments and in inter-trade time intervals as well as the non-Gaussian distributions of the fluctuations. Since the transaction-to-transaction price increments do not strongly depend on or are almost independent of the inter-trade waiting times, both can be sources of the observed multifractal behaviour of the fixed-delay returns and volatility. The results presented also allow one to evaluate the applicability of the Multifractal Model of Asset Returns in the case of tick-by-tick data.Comment: Physica A, in prin

Finite-size effect and the components of multifractality in financial volatility

Many financial variables are found to exhibit multifractal nature, which is usually attributed to the influence of temporal correlations and fat-tailedness in the probability distribution (PDF). Based on the partition function approach of multifractal analysis, we show that there is a marked finite-size effect in the detection of multifractality, and the effective multifractality is the apparent multifractality after removing the finite-size effect. We find that the effective multifractality can be further decomposed into two components, the PDF component and the nonlinearity component. Referring to the normal distribution, we can determine the PDF component by comparing the effective multifractality of the original time series and the surrogate data that have a normal distribution and keep the same linear and nonlinear correlations as the original data. We demonstrate our method by taking the daily volatility data of Dow Jones Industrial Average from 26 May 1896 to 27 April 2007 as an example. Extensive numerical experiments show that a time series exhibits effective multifractality only if it possesses nonlinearity and the PDF has impact on the effective multifractality only when the time series possesses nonlinearity. Our method can also be applied to judge the presence of multifractality and determine its components of multifractal time series in other complex systems.Comment: 9 RevTex pages including 9 eps figures. Comments and suggestions are warmly welcom