We analyze intraday fluctuations in several stock indices to investigate the underlying stochastic processes using techniques appropriate for processes with nonstationary increments. The five most actively traded stocks each contains two time intervals during the day where the variance of...

Recent reports suggest that the stochastic process underlying financial time series is nonstationary with nonstationary increments. Therefore, time averaging techniques through sliding intervals are inappropriate and ensemble methods have been proposed. Using daily ensemble averages we analyze...

Increments in financial markets have anomalous statistical properties including fat-tailed distributions and volatility clustering (i.e., the autocorrelation functions of return increments decay quickly but those of the squared increments decay slowly). One of the central questions in financial...

The method of cointegration in regression analysis is based on an assumption of stationary increments. Stationary increments with fixed time lag are called 'integration I(d)'. A class of regression models where cointegration works was identified by Granger and yields the ergodic behavior...

We discuss martingales, detrending data, and the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) for stochastic processes x(t) with arbitrary diffusion coefficients D(x,t). Beginning with x-independent drift coefficients R(t) we show that martingale stochastic processes generate uncorrelated, generally...

In their path-finding 1973 paper, Black and Scholes presented two separate derivations of their famous option pricing partial differential equation. The second derivation was from the standpoint that was Black's original motivation, namely, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). We show here,...

We show by explicit closed form calculations that a Hurst exponent H≠12 does not necessarily imply long time correlations like those found in fractional Brownian motion (fBm). We construct a large set of scaling solutions of Fokker–Planck partial differential equations (pdes) where H≠12....

The distribution of price returns is studied for a class of market models with Markovian dynamics. The models have a non-constant diffusion coefficient that depends on the value of the return. An analytical expression for the distribution of returns is obtained, and shown to match the results of...

This reply addresses the assertion in the comment of T.D. Frank [T.D. Frank, Physica A 387 (2008) 773] on our paper [K.E. Bassler, G.H. Gunaratne, J.L. McCauley, Physica A 369 (2006) 343] that the approach to modeling financial markets that we propose is unrealistic. In our paper, we considered...