No Arabic abstract
According to the leading models in modern finance, the presence of intraday lead-lag relationships between financial assets is negligible in efficient markets. With the advance of technology, however, markets have become more sophisticated. To determine whether this has resulted in an improved market efficiency, we investigate whether statistically significant lagged correlation relationships exist in financial markets. We introduce a numerical method to statistically validate links in correlation-based networks, and employ our method to study lagged correlation networks of equity returns in financial markets. Crucially, our statistical validation of lead-lag relationships accounts for multiple hypothesis testing over all stock pairs. In an analysis of intraday transaction data from the periods 2002--2003 and 2011--2012, we find a striking growth in the networks as we increase the frequency with which we sample returns. We compute how the number of validated links and the magnitude of correlations change with increasing sampling frequency, and compare the results between the two data sets. Finally, we compare topological properties of the directed correlation-based networks from the two periods using the in-degree and out-degree distributions and an analysis of three-node motifs. Our analysis suggests a growth in both the efficiency and instability of financial markets over the past decade.
We introduce a method to infer lead-lag networks of agents actions in complex systems. These networks open the way to both microscopic and macroscopic states prediction in such systems. We apply this method to trader-resolved data in the foreign exchange market. We show that these networks are remarkably persistent, which explains why and how order flow prediction is possible from trader-resolved data. In addition, if traders actions depend on past prices, the evolution of the average price paid by traders may also be predictable. Using random forests, we verify that the predictability of both the sign of order flow and the direction of average transaction price is strong for retail investors at an hourly time scale, which is of great relevance to brokers and order matching engines. Finally, we argue that the existence of trader lead-lag networks explains in a self-referential way why a given trader becomes active, which is in line with the fact that most trading activity has an endogenous origin.
We employ the thermal optimal path method to explore both the long-term and short-term interaction patterns between the onshore CNY and offshore CNH exchange rates (2012-2015). For the daily data, the CNY and CNH exchange rates show a weak alternate lead-lag structure in most of the time periods. When CNY and CNH display a large disparity, the lead-lag relationship is uncertain and depends on the prevailing market factors. The minute-scale interaction pattern between the CNY and CNH exchange rates change over time according to different market situations. We find that US dollar appreciation is associated with a lead-lag relationship running from offshore to onshore, while a (contrarian) Renminbi appreciation is associated with a lead-lag relationship running from onshore to offshore. These results are robust with respect to different sub-sample analyses and variations of the key smoothing parameter of the TOP method.
Common asset holding by financial institutions, namely portfolio overlap, is nowadays regarded as an important channel for financial contagion with the potential to trigger fire sales and thus severe losses at the systemic level. In this paper we propose a method to assess the statistical significance of the overlap between pairs of heterogeneously diversified portfolios, which then allows us to build a validated network of financial institutions where links indicate potential contagion channels due to realized portfolio overlaps. The method is implemented on a historical database of institutional holdings ranging from 1999 to the end of 2013, but can be in general applied to any bipartite network where the presence of similar sets of neighbors is of interest. We find that the proportion of validated network links (i.e., of statistically significant overlaps) increased steadily before the 2007-2008 global financial crisis and reached a maximum when the crisis occurred. We argue that the nature of this measure implies that systemic risk from fire sales liquidation was maximal at that time. After a sharp drop in 2008, systemic risk resumed its growth in 2009, with a notable acceleration in 2013, reaching levels not seen since 2007. We finally show that market trends tend to be amplified in the portfolios identified by the algorithm, such that it is possible to have an informative signal about financial institutions that are about to suffer (enjoy) the most significant losses (gains).
The extreme event statistics plays a very important role in the theory and practice of time series analysis. The reassembly of classical theoretical results is often undermined by non-stationarity and dependence between increments. Furthermore, the convergence to the limit distributions can be slow, requiring a huge amount of records to obtain significant statistics, and thus limiting its practical applications. Focussing, instead, on the closely related density of near-extremes -- the distance between a record and the maximal value -- can render the statistical methods to be more suitable in the practical applications and/or validations of models. We apply this recently proposed method in the empirical validation of an adapted financial market model of the intraday market fluctuations.
We present the symmetric thermal optimal path (TOPS) method to determine the time-dependent lead-lag relationship between two stochastic time series. This novel version of the previously introduced TOP method alleviates some inconsistencies by imposing that the lead-lag relationship should be invariant with respect to a time reversal of the time series after a change of sign. This means that, if `$X$ comes before $Y$, this transforms into `$Y$ comes before $X$ under a time reversal. We show that previously proposed bootstrap test lacks power and leads too often to a lack of rejection of the null that there is no lead-lag correlation when it is present. We introduce instead two novel tests. The first the free energy p-value $rho$ criterion quantifies the probability that a given lead-lag structure could be obtained from random time series with similar characteristics except for the lead-lag information. The second self-consistent test embodies the idea that, for the lead-lag path to be significant, synchronizing the two time series using the time varying lead-lag path should lead to a statistically significant correlation. We perform intensive synthetic tests to demonstrate their performance and limitations. Finally, we apply the TOPS method with the two new tests to the time dependent lead-lag structures of house price and monetary policy of the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) from 1991 to 2011. The TOPS approach stresses the importance of accounting for change of regimes, so that similar pieces of information or policies may have drastically different impacts and developments, conditional on the economic, financial and geopolitical conditions. This study reinforces the view that the hypothesis of statistical stationarity is highly questionable.