Anomalous volatility scaling in high frequency financial data

Volatility of intra-day stock market indices computed at various time horizons exhibits a scaling behaviour that differs from what would be expected from fractional Brownian motion (fBm). We investigate this anomalous scaling by using Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), a method which separates time series into a set of cyclical components at different time-scales. By applying EMD to fBm, we retrieve a scaling law that relates the variance of the components to a power law of the oscillating period. In contrast, when analysing 22 different stock market indices, we observe deviations from the fBm and Brownian motion scaling behaviour. These deviations are associated to the characteristics of financial markets, with the larger deviations corresponding to the less developed markets.