Fact or friction: Jumps at ultra high frequency

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that jumps in financial asset prices are overestimated in traditional analyses, with ultra high-frequency data revealing that true jumps are rare and contribute minimally to overall price variation.

Contribution

The paper introduces new econometric techniques applied to millisecond-level tick data, showing that previous jump estimates are significantly overstated.

Findings

Jumps are much rarer than previously thought.

Traditional measures overstate jump variation.

True jump contribution is an order of magnitude smaller.

Abstract

This paper shows that jumps in financial asset prices are often erroneously identified and are, in fact, rare events accounting for a very small proportion of the total price variation. We apply new econometric techniques to a comprehensive set of ultra high-frequency equity and foreign exchange tick data recorded at millisecond precision, allowing us to examine the price evolution at the individual order level. We show that in both theory and practice, traditional measures of jump variation based on lower-frequency data tend to spuriously assign a burst of volatility to the jump component. As a result, the true price variation coming from jumps is overstated. Our estimates based on tick data suggest that the jump variation is an order of magnitude smaller than typical estimates found in the existing literature.