arXiv subjects

Ladislav Kristoufek

Publications and source records attributed to Ladislav Kristoufek.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2013

Detrending moving-average cross-correlation coefficient: Measuring cross-correlations between non-stationary series

In the paper, we introduce a new measure of correlation between possibly non-stationary series. As the measure is based on the detrending moving-average cross-correlation analysis (DMCA), we label it as the DMCA coefficient $ρ_{DMCA}(λ)$ with a moving average window length $λ$. We analytically show that the coefficient ranges between -1 and 1 as a standard correlation does. In the simulation study, we show that the values of $ρ_{DMCA}(λ)$ very well correspond to the true correlation between the analyzed series regardless the (non-)stationarity level. Dependence of the newly proposed measure on other parameters -- correlation level, moving average window length and time series length -- is discussed as well.

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arXiv2013

Measuring correlations between non-stationary series with DCCA coefficient

In this short report, we investigate the ability of the DCCA coefficient to measure correlation level between non-stationary series. Based on a wide Monte Carlo simulation study, we show that the DCCA coefficient can estimate the correlation coefficient accurately regardless the strength of non-stationarity (measured by the fractional differencing parameter $d$). For a comparison, we also report the results for the standard Pearson's correlation coefficient. The DCCA coefficient dominates the Pearson's coefficient for non-stationary series.

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arXiv2013

Can Google Trends search queries contribute to risk diversification?

Portfolio diversification and active risk management are essential parts of financial analysis which became even more crucial (and questioned) during and after the years of the Global Financial Crisis. We propose a novel approach to portfolio diversification using the information of searched items on Google Trends. The diversification is based on an idea that popularity of a stock measured by search queries is correlated with the stock riskiness. We penalize the popular stocks by assigning them lower portfolio weights and we bring forward the less popular, or peripheral, stocks to decrease the total riskiness of the portfolio. Our results indicate that such strategy dominates both the benchmark index and the uniformly weighted portfolio both in-sample and out-of-sample.

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arXiv2013

Fractal Markets Hypothesis and the Global Financial Crisis: Wavelet Power Evidence

We analyze whether the prediction of the fractal markets hypothesis about a dominance of specific investment horizons during turbulent times holds. To do so, we utilize the continuous wavelet transform analysis and obtained wavelet power spectra which give the crucial information about the variance distribution across scales and its evolution in time. We show that the most turbulent times of the Global Financial Crisis can be very well characterized by the dominance of short investment horizons which is in hand with the assertions of the fractal markets hypothesis.

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arXiv2013

Commodity futures and market efficiency

We analyze the market efficiency of 25 commodity futures across various groups -- metals, energies, softs, grains and other agricultural commodities. To do so, we utilize recently proposed Efficiency Index to find that the most efficient of all the analyzed commodities is heating oil, closely followed by WTI crude oil, cotton, wheat and coffee. On the other end of the ranking, we detect live cattle and feeder cattle. The efficiency is also found to be characteristic for specific groups of commodities -- energy commodities being the most efficient and the other agricultural commodities (formed mainly of livestock) the least efficient groups. We also discuss contributions of the long-term memory, fractal dimension and approximate entropy to the total inefficiency. Last but not least, we come across the nonstandard relationship between the fractal dimension and Hurst exponent. For the analyzed dataset, the relationship between these two is positive meaning that local persistence (trending) is connected to global anti-persistence. We attribute this to specifics of commodity futures which might be predictable in a short term and locally but in a long term, they return to their fundamental price.

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arXiv2013

Long-term memory in electricity prices: Czech market evidence

We analyze long-term memory properties of hourly prices of electricity in the Czech Republic between 2009 and 2012. As the dynamics of the electricity prices is dominated by cycles -- mainly intraday and daily -- we opt for the detrended fluctuation analysis, which is well suited for such specific series. We find that the electricity prices are non-stationary but strongly mean-reverting which distinguishes them from other financial assets which are usually characterized as unit root series. Such description is attributed to specific features of electricity prices, mainly to non-storability. Additionally, we argue that the rapid mean-reversion is due to the principles of electricity spot prices. These properties are shown to be stable across all studied years.

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arXiv2013

Exponential and power laws in public procurement markets

For the first time ever, we analyze a unique public procurement database, which includes information about a number of bidders for a contract, a final price, an identification of a winner and an identification of a contracting authority for each of more than 40,000 public procurements in the Czech Republic between 2006 and 2011, focusing on the distributional properties of the variables of interest. We uncover several scaling laws -- the exponential law for the number of bidders, and the power laws for the total revenues and total spendings of the participating companies, which even follows the Zipf's law for the 100 most spending institutions. We propose an analogy between extensive and non-extensive systems in physics and the public procurement market situations. Through an entropy maximization, such the analogy yields some interesting results and policy implications with respect to the Maxwell-Boltzmann and Pareto distributions in the analyzed quantities.

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arXiv2013

Mixed-correlated ARFIMA processes for power-law cross-correlations

We introduce a general framework of the Mixed-correlated ARFIMA (MC-ARFIMA) processes which allows for various specifications of univariate and bivariate long-term memory. Apart from a standard case when $H_{xy}={1}{2}(H_x+H_y)$, MC-ARFIMA also allows for processes with $H_{xy}<{1}{2}(H_x+H_y)$ but also for long-range correlated processes which are either short-range cross-correlated or simply correlated. The major contribution of MC-ARFIMA lays in the fact that the processes have well-defined asymptotic properties for $H_x$, $H_y$ and $H_{xy}$, which are derived in the paper, so that the processes can be used in simulation studies comparing various estimators of the bivariate Hurst exponent $H_{xy}$. Moreover, the framework allows for modeling of processes which are found to have $H_{xy}<{1}{2}(H_x+H_y)$.

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arXiv2013

Testing power-law cross-correlations: Rescaled covariance test

We introduce a new test for detection of power-law cross-correlations among a pair of time series - the rescaled covariance test. The test is based on a power-law divergence of the covariance of the partial sums of the long-range cross-correlated processes. Utilizing a heteroskedasticity and auto-correlation robust estimator of the long-term covariance, we develop a test with desirable statistical properties which is well able to distinguish between short- and long-range cross-correlations. Such test should be used as a starting point in the analysis of long-range cross-correlations prior to an estimation of bivariate long-term memory parameters. As an application, we show that the relationship between volatility and traded volume, and volatility and returns in the financial markets can be labeled as the one with power-law cross-correlations.

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arXiv2012

Time-Frequency Dynamics of Biofuels-Fuels-Food System

For the first time, we apply the wavelet coherence methodology on biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) and a wide range of related commodities (gasoline, diesel, crude oil, corn, wheat, soybeans, sugarcane and rapeseed oil). This way, we are able to investigate dynamics of correlations in time and across scales (frequencies) with a model-free approach. We show that correlations indeed vary in time and across frequencies. We find two highly correlated pairs which are strongly connected at low frequencies - ethanol with corn and biodiesel with German diesel - during almost the whole analyzed period (2003-2011). Structure of correlations remarkably changes during the food crisis - higher frequencies become important for both mentioned pairs. This implies that during stable periods, ethanol is correlated with corn and biodiesel is correlated with German diesel mainly at low frequencies so that they follow a common long-term trend. However, in the crisis periods, ethanol (biodiesel) is lead by corn (German diesel) even at high frequencies (low scales), which implies that the biofuels prices react more rapidly to the changes in their producing factors.

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arXiv2012

Measuring capital market efficiency: Global and local correlations structure

We introduce a new measure for the capital market efficiency. The measure takes into consideration the correlation structure of the returns (long-term and short-term memory) and local herding behavior (fractal dimension). The efficiency measure is taken as a distance from an ideal efficient market situation. Methodology is applied to a portfolio of 41 stock indices. We find that the Japanese NIKKEI is the most efficient market. From geographical point of view, the more efficient markets are dominated by the European stock indices and the less efficient markets cover mainly Latin America, Asia and Oceania. The inefficiency is mainly driven by a local herding, i.e. a low fractal dimension.

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arXiv2012

Fractal Markets Hypothesis and the Global Financial Crisis: Scaling, Investment Horizons and Liquidity

We investigate whether fractal markets hypothesis and its focus on liquidity and invest- ment horizons give reasonable predictions about dynamics of the financial markets during the turbulences such as the Global Financial Crisis of late 2000s. Compared to the mainstream efficient markets hypothesis, fractal markets hypothesis considers financial markets as com- plex systems consisting of many heterogenous agents, which are distinguishable mainly with respect to their investment horizon. In the paper, several novel measures of trading activity at different investment horizons are introduced through scaling of variance of the underlying processes. On the three most liquid US indices - DJI, NASDAQ and S&P500 - we show that predictions of fractal markets hypothesis actually fit the observed behavior quite well.

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arXiv2012

On Hurst exponent estimation under heavy-tailed distributions

In this paper, we show how the sampling properties of the Hurst exponent methods of estimation change with the presence of heavy tails. We run extensive Monte Carlo simulations to find out how rescaled range analysis (R/S), multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA), detrending moving average (DMA) and generalized Hurst exponent approach (GHE) estimate Hurst exponent on independent series with different heavy tails. For this purpose, we generate independent random series from stable distribution with stability exponent α changing from 1.1 (heaviest tails) to 2 (Gaussian normal distribution) and we estimate the Hurst exponent using the different methods. R/S and GHE prove to be robust to heavy tails in the underlying process. GHE provides the lowest variance and bias in comparison to the other methods regardless the presence of heavy tails in data and sample size. Utilizing this result, we apply a novel approach of the intraday time-dependent Hurst exponent and we estimate the Hurst exponent on high frequency data for each trading day separately. We obtain Hurst exponents for S&P500 index for the period beginning with year 1983 and ending by November 2009 and we discuss the surprising result which uncovers how the market's behavior changed over this long period.

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arXiv2012

Multifractal Height Cross-Correlation Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Long-Range Cross-Correlations

We introduce a new method for detection of long-range cross-correlations and multifractality - multifractal height cross-correlation analysis (MF-HXA) - based on scaling of qth order covariances. MF-HXA is a bivariate generalization of the height-height correlation analysis of Barabasi & Vicsek [Barabasi, A.L., Vicsek, T.: Multifractality of self-affine fractals, Physical Review A 44(4), 1991]. The method can be used to analyze long-range cross-correlations and multifractality between two simultaneously recorded series. We illustrate a power of the method on both simulated and real-world time series.

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arXiv2011

On interrelations of recurrences and connectivity trends between stock indices

Financial data has been extensively studied for correlations using Pearson's cross-correlation coefficient ρ as the point of departure. We employ an estimator based on recurrence plots --- the Correlation of Probability of Recurrence (CPR) --- to analyze connections between nine stock indices spread worldwide. We suggest a slight modification of the CPR approach in order to get more robust results. We examine trends in CPR for an approximately 19-month window moved along the time series and compare them to ρ. Binning CPR into three levels of connectedness: strong, moderate and weak, we extract the trends in number of connections in each bin over time. We also look at the behavior of CPR during the Dot-Com bubble by shifting the time series to align their peaks. CPR mainly uncovers that the markets move in and out of periods of strong connectivity erratically, instead of moving monotonously towards increasing global connectivity. This is in contrast to ρ, which gives a picture of ever increasing correlation. CPR also exhibits that time shifted markets have high connectivity around the Dot-Com bubble of 2000. We stress on the importance of significance testing in interpreting measures applied to field data. CPR is more robust to significance testing. It has the additional advantages of being robust to noise, and reliable for short time series lengths and low frequency of sampling. Further, it is more sensitive to changes than ρ as it captures correlations between the essential dynamics of the underlying systems.

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