Dynamical variety of shapes in financial multifractality

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex, evolving multifractal shapes of stock market indices, revealing their correlation with major economic events and the underlying stock correlations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that multifractal features of stock indices are diverse and asymmetric, evolving over time and linked to significant economic events, extending prior multifractality studies.

Findings

Stock indices develop multifractal features with diverse shapes.

Multifractal spectra change in relation to major economic events.

Correlation among stocks varies with the multifractal characteristics.

Abstract

The concept of multifractality offers a powerful formal tool to filter out multitude of the most relevant characteristics of complex time series. The related studies thus far presented in the scientific literature typically limit themselves to evaluation of whether or not a time series is multifractal and width of the resulting singularity spectrum is considered a measure of the degree of complexity involved. However, the character of the complexity of time series generated by the natural processes usually appears much more intricate than such a bare statement can reflect. As an example, based on the long-term records of S&P500 and NASDAQ - the two world leading stock market indices - the present study shows that they indeed develop the multifractal features, but these features evolve through a variety of shapes, most often strongly asymmetric, whose changes typically are correlated with the historically most significant events experienced by the world economy. Relating at the same time the index multifractal singularity spectra to those of the component stocks that form this index reflects the varying degree of correlations involved among the stocks.