In the current era of worldwide stock market interdependencies, the global financial village has become increasingly vulnerable to systemic collapse. The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the necessity of understanding and quantifying in
terdependencies among the worlds economies, developing new effective approaches to risk evaluation, and providing mitigating solutions. We present a methodological framework for quantifying interdependencies in the global market and for evaluating risk levels in the world-wide financial network. The resulting information will enable policy and decision makers to better measure, understand, and maintain financial stability. We use the methodology to rank the economic importance of each industry and country according to the global damage that would result from their failure. Our quantitative results shed new light on Chinas increasing economic dominance over other economies, including that of the USA, to the global economy.
In a highly interdependent economic world, the nature of relationships between financial entities is becoming an increasingly important area of study. Recently, many studies have shown the usefulness of minimal spanning trees (MST) in extracting inte
ractions between financial entities. Here, we propose a modified MST network whose metric distance is defined in terms of cross-correlation coefficient absolute values, enabling the connections between anticorrelated entities to manifest properly. We investigate 69 daily time series, comprising three types of financial assets: 28 stock market indicators, 21 currency futures, and 20 commodity futures. We show that though the resulting MST network evolves over time, the financial assets of similar type tend to have connections which are stable over time. In addition, we find a characteristic time lag between the volatility time series of the stock market indicators and those of the EU CO2 emission allowance (EUA) and crude oil futures (WTI). This time lag is given by the peak of the cross-correlation function of the volatility time series EUA (or WTI) with that of the stock market indicators, and is markedly different (>20 days) from 0, showing that the volatility of stock market indicators today can predict the volatility of EU emissions allowances and of crude oil in the near future.
We construct and analyze a climate network which represents the interdependent structure of the climate in different geographical zones and find that the network responds in a unique way to El-Ni~{n}o events. Analyzing the dynamics of the climate net
work shows that when El-Ni~{n}o events begin, the El-Ni~{n}o basin partially loses its influence on its surroundings. After typically three months, this influence is restored while the basin loses almost all dependence on its surroundings and becomes textit{autonomous}. The formation of an autonomous basin is the missing link to understand the seemingly contradicting phenomena of the afore--noticed weakening of the interdependencies in the climate network during El-Ni~{n}o and the known impact of the anomalies inside the El-Ni~{n}o basin on the global climate system.
Equity activity is an essential topic for financial market studies. To explore its statistical regularities, we comprehensively examine the trading value, a measure of the equity activity, of the 3314 most-traded stocks in the U.S. equity market and
find that (i) the trading values follow a log-normal distribution; (ii) the standard deviation of the growth rate of the trading value obeys a power-law with the initial trading value, and the power-law exponent beta=0.14. Remarkably, both features hold for a wide range of sampling intervals, from 5 minutes to 20 trading days. Further, we show that all the 3314 stocks have long-term correlations, and their Hurst exponents H follow a normal distribution. Furthermore, we find that the Hurst exponent depends on the size of the company. We also show that the relation between the scaling in the growth rate and the long-term correlation is consistent with beta=1-H, similar to that found recently on human interaction activity by Rybski and collaborators.
We study the volatility time series of 1137 most traded stocks in the US stock markets for the two-year period 2001-02 and analyze their return intervals $tau$, which are time intervals between volatilities above a given threshold $q$. We explore the
probability density function of $tau$, $P_q(tau)$, assuming a stretched exponential function, $P_q(tau) sim e^{-tau^gamma}$. We find that the exponent $gamma$ depends on the threshold in the range between $q=1$ and 6 standard deviations of the volatility. This finding supports the multiscaling nature of the return interval distribution. To better understand the multiscaling origin, we study how $gamma$ depends on four essential factors, capitalization, risk, number of trades and return. We show that $gamma$ depends on the capitalization, risk and return but almost does not depend on the number of trades. This suggests that $gamma$ relates to the portfolio selection but not on the market activity. To further characterize the multiscaling of individual stocks, we fit the moments of $tau$, $mu_m equiv <(tau/<tau>)^m>^{1/m}$, in the range of $10 < <tau> le 100$ by a power-law, $mu_m sim <tau>^delta$. The exponent $delta$ is found also to depend on the capitalization, risk and return but not on the number of trades, and its tendency is opposite to that of $gamma$. Moreover, we show that $delta$ decreases with $gamma$ approximately by a linear relation. The return intervals demonstrate the temporal structure of volatilities and our findings suggest that their multiscaling features may be helpful for portfolio optimization.
The temperatures in different zones in the world do not show significant changes due to El-Nino except when measured in a restricted area in the Pacific Ocean. We find, in contrast, that the dynamics of a climate network based on the same temperature
records in various geographical zones in the world is significantly influenced by El-Nino. During El-Nino many links of the network are broken, and the number of surviving links comprises a specific and sensitive measure for El-Nino events. While during non El-Nino periods these links which represent correlations between temperatures in different sites are more stable, fast fluctuations of the correlations observed during El-Nino periods cause the links to break.
The distribution of the return intervals $tau$ between volatilities above a threshold $q$ for financial records has been approximated by a scaling behavior. To explore how accurate is the scaling and therefore understand the underlined non-linear mec
hanism, we investigate intraday datasets of 500 stocks which consist of the Standard & Poors 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 $mu_m equiv <(tau/<tau>)^m>^{1/m}$, which show a certain trend with the mean interval $<tau>$. 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 range of $<tau>$. Those substantial differences suggest that non-linear 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 $<tau>$, 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 $10<<tau>leq100$, and find the exponent $alpha$ from the power law fitting $mu_msim<tau>^alpha$ has a narrow distribution around $alpha eq0$ which depend on m for the 500 stocks. The distribution of $alpha$ for the surrogate records are very narrow and centered around $alpha=0$. This suggests that the return interval distribution exhibit multiscaling behavior due to the non-linear correlations in the original volatility.
