Scaling and Memory Effect in Volatility Return Interval of the Chinese Stock Market

Abstract

We investigate the probability distribution of the volatility return intervals $τ$ for the Chinese stock market. We rescale both the probability distribution $P_{q}(τ)$ and the volatility return intervals $τ$ as $P_{q}(τ)=1/\barτ f(τ/\barτ)$ to obtain a uniform scaling curve for different threshold value $q$. The scaling curve can be well fitted by the stretched exponential function $f(x) \sim e^{-αx^γ}$, which suggests memory exists in $τ$. To demonstrate the memory effect, we investigate the conditional probability distribution $P_{q} (τ|τ_{0})$, the mean conditional interval $<τ|τ_{0}>$ and the cumulative probability distribution of the cluster size of $τ$. The results show clear clustering effect. We further investigate the persistence probability distribution $P_{\pm}(t)$ and find that $P_{-}(t)$ decays by a power law with the exponent far different from the value 0.5 for the random walk, which further confirms long memory exists in $τ$. The scaling and long memory effect of $τ$ for the Chinese stock market are similar to those obtained from the United States and the Japanese financial markets.

10 elsart pages including 7 eps figures