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 investigate the two components of the total daily return (close-to-close), the overnight return (close-to-open) and the daytime return (open-to-close), as well as the corresponding volatilities of the 2215 NYSE stocks from 1988 to 2007. The tail d
istribution of the volatility, the long-term memory in the sequence, and the cross-correlation between different returns are analyzed. Our results suggest that: (i) The two component returns and volatilities have similar features as that of the total return and volatility. The tail distribution follows a power law for all volatilities, and long-term correlations exist in the volatility sequences but not in the return sequences. (ii) The daytime return contributes more to the total return. Both the tail distribution and the long-term memory of the daytime volatility are more similar to that of the total volatility, compared to the overnight records. In addition, the cross-correlation between the daytime return and the total return is also stronger. (iii) The two component returns tend to be anti-correlated. Moreover, we find that the cross-correlations between the three different returns (total, overnight, and daytime) are quite stable over the entire 20-year period.
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 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.
