Quantifying Stock Price Response to Demand Fluctuations

Abstract

We address the question of how stock prices respond to changes in demand. We quantify the relations between price change $G$ over a time interval $Δt$ and two different measures of demand fluctuations: (a) $Φ$, defined as the difference between the number of buyer-initiated and seller-initiated trades, and (b) $Ω$, defined as the difference in number of shares traded in buyer and seller initiated trades. We find that the conditional expectations $<G >_Ω$ and $<G >_Φ$ of price change for a given $Ω$ or $Φ$ are both concave. We find that large price fluctuations occur when demand is very small --- a fact which is reminiscent of large fluctuations that occur at critical points in spin systems, where the divergent nature of the response function leads to large fluctuations.

4 pages (multicol fomat, revtex)