We analyze the multifractal spectra of daily foreign exchange rates for Japan, Hong-Kong, Korea, and Thailand with respect to the United States Dollar from 1991 to 2005. We find that the return time series show multifractal spectrum features for all four cases. To observe the effect of the Asian currency crisis, we also estimate the multifractal spectra of limited series before and after the crisis. We find that the Korean and Thai foreign exchange markets experienced a significant increase in multifractality compared to Hong-Kong and Japan. We also show that the multifractality is stronge related to the presence of high values of returns in the series.
The ultimate value of theories of the fundamental mechanisms comprising the asset price in financial systems will be reflected in the capacity of such theories to understand these systems. Although the models that explain the various states of financial markets offer substantial evidences from the fields of finance, mathematics, and even physics to explain states observed in the real financial markets, previous theories that attempt to fully explain the complexities of financial markets have been inadequate. In this study, we propose an artificial double auction market as an agent-based model approach to study the origin of complex states in the financial markets, characterizing important parameters with an investment strategy that can cover the dynamics of the financial market. The investment strategy of chartist traders after market information arrives should reduce market stability originating in the price fluctuations of risky assets. However, fundamentalist traders strategically submit orders with a fundamental value and, thereby stabilize the market. We construct a continuous double auction market and find that the market is controlled by a fraction of chartists, P_{c}. We show that mimicking real financial markets state, which emerges in real financial systems, is given between approximately P_{c} = 0.40 and P_{c} = 0.85, but that mimicking the efficient market hypothesis state can be generated in a range of less than P_{c} = 0.40. In particular, we observe that the mimicking market collapse state created in a value greater than P_{c} = 0.85, in which a liquidity shortage occurs, and the phase transition behavior is P_{c} = 0.85.
We apply a simple trading strategy for various time series of real and artificial stock prices to understand the origin of fractality observed in the resulting profit landscapes. The strategy contains only two parameters $p$ and $q$, and the sell (buy) decision is made when the log return is larger (smaller) than $p$ ($-q$). We discretize the unit square $(p, q) in [0, 1] times [0, 1]$ into the $N times N$ square grid and the profit $Pi (p, q)$ is calculated at the center of each cell. We confirm the previous finding that local maxima in profit landscapes are scattered in a fractal-like fashion: The number M of local maxima follows the power-law form $M sim N^{a}$, but the scaling exponent $a$ is found to differ for different time series. From comparisons of real and artificial stock prices, we find that the fat-tailed return distribution is closely related to the exponent $a approx 1.6$ observed for real stock markets. We suggest that the fractality of profit landscape characterized by $a approx 1.6$ can be a useful measure to validate time series model for stock prices.
We propose a stochastic process driven by memory effect with novel distributions including both exponential and leptokurtic heavy-tailed distributions. A class of distribution is analytically derived from the continuum limit of the discrete binary process with the renormalized auto-correlation and the closed form moment generating function is obtained, thus the cumulants are calculated and shown to be convergent. The other class of distributions are numerically investigated. The concoction of the two stochastic processes of the different signs of memory under regime switching mechanism does incarnate power-law decay behavior, which strongly implies that memory is the alternative origin of heavy-tail.
We investigate the statistical properties of the correlation matrix between individual stocks traded in the Korean stock market using the random matrix theory (RMT) and observe how these affect the portfolio weights in the Markowitz portfolio theory. We find that the distribution of the correlation matrix is positively skewed and changes over time. We find that the eigenvalue distribution of original correlation matrix deviates from the eigenvalues predicted by the RMT, and the largest eigenvalue is 52 times larger than the maximum value among the eigenvalues predicted by the RMT. The $beta_{473}$ coefficient, which reflect the largest eigenvalue property, is 0.8, while one of the eigenvalues in the RMT is approximately zero. Notably, we show that the entropy function $E(sigma)$ with the portfolio risk $sigma$ for the original and filtered correlation matrices are consistent with a power-law function, $E(sigma) sim sigma^{-gamma}$, with the exponent $gamma sim 2.92$ and those for Asian currency crisis decreases significantly.
We empirically investigated the relationships between the degree of efficiency and the predictability in financial time-series data. The Hurst exponent was used as the measurement of the degree of efficiency, and the hit rate calculated from the nearest-neighbor prediction method was used for the prediction of the directions of future price changes. We used 60 market indexes of various countries. We empirically discovered that the relationship between the degree of efficiency (the Hurst exponent) and the predictability (the hit rate) is strongly positive. That is, a market index with a higher Hurst exponent tends to have a higher hit rate. These results suggested that the Hurst exponent is useful for predicting future price changes. Furthermore, we also discovered that the Hurst exponent and the hit rate are useful as standards that can distinguish emerging capital markets from mature capital markets.
We propose a novel method to quantify the clustering behavior in a complex time series and apply it to a high-frequency data of the financial markets. We find that regardless of used data sets, all data exhibits the volatility clustering properties, whereas those which filtered the volatility clustering effect by using the GARCH model reduce volatility clustering significantly. The result confirms that our method can measure the volatility clustering effect in financial market.
In this study, we have investigated factors of determination which can affect the connected structure of a stock network. The representative index for topological properties of a stock network is the number of links with other stocks. We used the multi-factor model, extensively acknowledged in financial literature. In the multi-factor model, common factors act as independent variables while returns of individual stocks act as dependent variables. We calculated the coefficient of determination, which represents the measurement value of the degree in which dependent variables are explained by independent variables. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between the number of links in the stock network and the coefficient of determination in the multi-factor model. We used individual stocks traded on the market indices of Korea, Japan, Canada, Italy and the UK. The results are as follows. We found that the mean coefficient of determination of stocks with a large number of links have higher values than those with a small number of links with other stocks. These results suggest that common factors are significantly deterministic factors to be taken into account when making a stock network. Furthermore, stocks with a large number of links to other stocks can be more affected by common factors.
This study investigates empirically whether the degree of stock market efficiency is related to the prediction power of future price change using the indices of twenty seven stock markets. Efficiency refers to weak-form efficient market hypothesis (EMH) in terms of the information of past price changes. The prediction power corresponds to the hit-rate, which is the rate of the consistency between the direction of actual price change and that of predicted one, calculated by the nearest neighbor prediction method (NN method) using the out-of-sample. In this manuscript, the Hurst exponent and the approximate entropy (ApEn) are used as the quantitative measurements of the degree of efficiency. The relationship between the Hurst exponent, reflecting the various time correlation property, and the ApEn value, reflecting the randomness in the time series, shows negative correlation. However, the average prediction power on the direction of future price change has the strongly positive correlation with the Hurst exponent, and the negative correlation with the ApEn. Therefore, the market index with less market efficiency has higher prediction power for future price change than one with higher market efficiency when we analyze the market using the past price change pattern. Furthermore, we show that the Hurst exponent, a measurement of the long-term memory property, provides more significant information in terms of prediction of future price changes than the ApEn and the NN method.
The stock market has been known to form homogeneous stock groups with a higher correlation among different stocks according to common economic factors that influence individual stocks. We investigate the role of common economic factors in the market in the formation of stock networks, using the arbitrage pricing model reflecting essential properties of common economic factors. We find that the degree of consistency between real and model stock networks increases as additional common economic factors are incorporated into our model. Furthermore, we find that individual stocks with a large number of links to other stocks in a network are more highly correlated with common economic factors than those with a small number of links. This suggests that common economic factors in the stock market can be understood in terms of deterministic factors.
