All issues

The article proposes a method of joint analysis of multidimensional financial time series based on the evaluation of the set of properties of stock quotes in a sliding time window and the subsequent averaging of property values for all analyzed companies. The main purpose of the analysis is to construct measures of joint behavior of time series reacting to the occurrence of a synchronous or coherent component. The coherence of the behavior of the characteristics of a complex system is an important feature that makes it possible to evaluate the approach of the system to sharp changes in its state. The basis for the search for precursors of sharp changes is the general idea of increasing the correlation of random fluctuations of the system parameters as it approaches the critical state. The increments in time series of stock values have a pronounced chaotic character and have a large amplitude of individual noises, against which a weak common signal can be detected only on the basis of its correlation in different scalar components of a multidimensional time series. It is known that classical methods of analysis based on the use of correlations between neighboring samples are ineffective in the processing of financial time series, since from the point of view of the correlation theory of random processes, increments in the value of shares formally have all the attributes of white noise (in particular, the “flat spectrum” and “delta-shaped” autocorrelation function). In connection with this, it is proposed to go from analyzing the initial signals to examining the sequences of their nonlinear properties calculated in time fragments of small length. As such properties, the entropy of the wavelet coefficients is used in the decomposition into the Daubechies basis, the multifractal parameters and the autoregressive measure of signal nonstationarity. Measures of synchronous behavior of time series properties in a sliding time window are constructed using the principal component method, moduli values of all pairwise correlation coefficients, and a multiple spectral coherence measure that is a generalization of the quadratic coherence spectrum between two signals. The shares of 16 large Russian companies from the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2016 were studied. Using the proposed method, two synchronization time intervals of the Russian stock market were identified: from mid-December 2013 to mid- March 2014 and from mid-October 2014 to mid-January 2016.

Financial mathematics is one of the most natural applications for the statistical analysis of time series. Financial time series reflect simultaneous activity of a large number of different economic agents. Consequently, one expects that methods of statistical physics and the theory of random processes can be applied to them.

In this paper, we provide a statistical analysis of time series of the FOREX currency market. Of particular interest is the comparison of the time series behavior depending on the way time is measured: physical time versus trading time measured in the number of elementary price changes (ticks). The experimentally observed statistics of the time series under consideration (euro–dollar for the first half of 2007 and for 2009 and British pound – dollar for 2007) radically differs depending on the choice of the method of time measurement. When measuring time in ticks, the distribution of price increments can be well described by the normal distribution already on a scale of the order of ten ticks. At the same time, when price increments are measured in real physical time, the distribution of increments continues to differ radically from the normal up to scales of the order of minutes and even hours.

To explain this phenomenon, we investigate the statistical properties of elementary increments in price and time. In particular, we show that the distribution of time between ticks for all three time series has a long (1-2 orders of magnitude) power-law tails with exponential cutoff at large times. We obtained approximate expressions for the distributions of waiting times for all three cases. Other statistical characteristics of the time series (the distribution of elementary price changes, pair correlation functions for price increments and for waiting times) demonstrate fairly simple behavior. Thus, it is the anomalously wide distribution of the waiting times that plays the most important role in the deviation of the distribution of increments from the normal. As a result, we discuss the possibility of applying a continuous time random walk (CTRW) model to describe the FOREX time series.