Efficient Markets, Behavioral Finance and a Statistical Evidence of the Validity of Technical Analysis

We study the time dependent cross correlations of stock returns, i.e. we measure the correlation as the function of the time shift between pairs of stock return time series using tick-by-tick data. We find a weak but significant effect showing that in many cases the maximum correlation is at nonzero time shift indicating directions of influence between the companies. Due to the weakness of the effect and the shortness of the characteristic time (in the order of a few minutes)...

It is hypothesized that price charts can be empirically decomposed into two components as random and non random. The non random component, which can be treated as approximately regular behavior of the prices (trend) in an epoch, is a geometric line. Thus, the random component fluctuates around the non random component with various amplitudes. Moreover, the shape of a trend in an epoch may be different in another epoch. It is further hypothesized that statistical evidence can ...

The classical technical analysis methods of financial time series based on the moving average and momentum is recalled. Illustrations use the IBM share price and Latin American (Argentinian MerVal, Brazilian Bovespa and Mexican IPC) market indices. We have also searched for scaling ranges and exponents in exchange rates between Latin American currencies ($ARS$, $CLP$, $MXP$) and other major currencies $DEM$, $GBP$, $JPY$, $USD$, and $SDR$s. We have sorted out correlations and...

Econophysics is a science in its infancy, born about ten years ago at this time of writing, at the crossing roads of physics, mathematics, computing and of course economics and finance. It also covers human sciences, because all economics is ultimately driven by human decision. From this human factor, econophysics has no hope to achieve the status of an exact science, but it is interesting to discover what can be achieved, discovering potential limits and trying try to push f...

We analyse the temporal changes in the cross correlations of returns on the New York Stock Exchange. We show that lead-lag relationships between daily returns of stocks vanished in less than twenty years. We have found that even for high frequency data the asymmetry of time dependent cross-correlation functions has a decreasing tendency, the position of their peaks are shifted towards the origin while these peaks become sharper and higher, resulting in a diminution of the Epp...

This study investigates empirically whether the degree of stock market efficiency is related to the prediction power of future price change using the indices of twenty seven stock markets. Efficiency refers to weak-form efficient market hypothesis (EMH) in terms of the information of past price changes. The prediction power corresponds to the hit-rate, which is the rate of the consistency between the direction of actual price change and that of predicted one, calculated by th...

Using frequency distributions of daily closing price time series of several financial market indexes, we investigate whether the bias away from an equiprobable sequence distribution found in the data, predicted by algorithmic information theory, may account for some of the deviation of financial markets from log-normal, and if so for how much of said deviation and over what sequence lengths. We do so by comparing the distributions of binary sequences from actual time series o...

Price dynamics is analyzed in terms of a model which includes the possibility of effective forces due to trend followers or trend adverse strategies. The method is tested on the data of a minority-majority model and indeed it is capable of reconstructing the prevailing traders' strategies in a given time interval. Then we also analyze real (NYSE) stock-prices dynamics and it is possible to derive an indication for the the ``sentiment'' of the market for time intervals of at l...

The purpose of this paper is to showcase trading strategies that give solutions to three difficult and intriguing problems in business finance, economics and statistics. The paper discusses trading strategies for both commodities and stocks but the main focus is on stock market trading at the New York Stock Exchange. Problem 1: Buy Low and Sell High. The buy low and sell high problem can be summarized like this: suppose the price of a commodity or stock fluctuates indefinit...

The Efficient Market Hypothesis has been a staple of economics research for decades. In particular, weak-form market efficiency -- the notion that past prices cannot predict future performance -- is strongly supported by econometric evidence. In contrast, machine learning algorithms implemented to predict stock price have been touted, to varying degrees, as successful. Moreover, some data scientists boast the ability to garner above-market returns using price data alone. This...