Quantifying bid-ask spreads in the Chinese stock market using limit-order book data: Intraday pattern, probability distribution, long memory, and multifractal nature

We study the dynamics of order flows around large intraday price changes using ultra-high-frequency data from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. We find a significant reversal of price for both intraday price decreases and increases with a permanent price impact. The volatility, the volume of different types of orders, the bid-ask spread, and the volume imbalance increase before the extreme events and decay slowly as a power law, which forms a well-established peak. The volume of b...

In this paper, we study the dynamics of absolute return, trading volume and bid-ask spread after the trading halts using high-frequency data from the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We deal with all three types of trading halts, namely intraday halts, one-day halts and inter-day halts, of 203 stocks in Shanghai Stock Exchange from August 2009 to August 2011. We find that absolute return, trading volume, and in case of bid-ask spread around intraday halts share the same pattern with ...

By applying the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis to the high-frequency tick-by-tick data from Deutsche B\"orse both in the price and in the time domains, we investigate multifractal properties of the time series of logarithmic price increments and inter-trade intervals of time. We show that both quantities reveal multiscaling and that this result holds across different stocks. The origin of the multifractal character of the corresponding dynamics is, among others, ...

Intertrade duration of equities is an important financial measure characterizing the trading activities, which is defined as the waiting time between successive trades of an equity. Using the ultrahigh-frequency data of a liquid Chinese stock and its associated warrant, we perform a comparative investigation of the statistical properties of their intertrade duration time series. The distributions of the two equities can be better described by the shifted power-law form than t...

Using ultra-high-frequency data extracted from the order flows of 23 stocks traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, we study the empirical regularities of order placement in the opening call auction, cool period and continuous auction. The distributions of relative logarithmic prices against reference prices in the three time periods are qualitatively the same with quantitative discrepancies. The order placement behavior is asymmetric between buyers and sellers and between the...

Price limit trading rules are adopted in some stock markets (especially emerging markets) trying to cool off traders' short-term trading mania on individual stocks and increase market efficiency. Under such a microstructure, stocks may hit their up-limits and down-limits from time to time. However, the behaviors of price limit hits are not well studied partially due to the fact that main stock markets such as the US markets and most European markets do not set price limits. H...

We propose a new set of stylized facts quantifying the structure of financial markets. The key idea is to study the combined structure of both investment strategies and prices in order to open a qualitatively new level of understanding of financial and economic markets. We study the detailed order flow on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China for the whole year of 2003. This enormous dataset allows us to compare (i) a closed national market (A-shares) with an international mar...

The distribution of trade sizes and trading volumes are investigated based on the limit order book data of 22 liquid Chinese stocks listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in the whole year 2003. We observe that the size distribution of trades for individual stocks exhibits jumps, which is caused by the number preference of traders when placing orders. We analyze the applicability of the "$q$-Gamma" function for fitting the distribution by the Cram\'{e}r-von Mises criterion. Th...

We study the distributions of event-time returns and clock-time returns at different microscopic timescales using ultra-high-frequency data extracted from the limit-order books of 23 stocks traded in the Chinese stock market in 2003. We find that the returns at the one-trade timescale obey the inverse cubic law. For larger timescales (2-32 trades and 1-5 minutes), the returns follow the Student distribution with power-law tails. With the decrease of timescale, the tail become...

We study the statistical properties of the recurrence intervals $\tau$ between successive trading volumes exceeding a certain threshold $q$. The recurrence interval analysis is carried out for the 20 liquid Chinese stocks covering a period from January 2000 to May 2009, and two Chinese indices from January 2003 to April 2009. Similar to the recurrence interval distribution of the price returns, the tail of the recurrence interval distribution of the trading volumes follows a ...