Author Archives: Lucio Calcagnile

L.M. Calcagnile, F. Corsi, S. Marmi, Entropy and efficiency of the ETF market

We investigate the relative information efficiency of financial markets by measuring the entropy of the time series of high frequency data. Our tool to measure efficiency is the Shannon entropy, applied to 2-symbol and 3-symbol discretisations of the data. Analysing 1-minute and 5-minute price time series of 55 Exchange Traded Funds traded at the New York Stock Exchange, we develop a methodology to isolate true inefficiencies from other sources of regularities, such as the intraday pattern, the volatility clustering and the microstructure effects. The first two are modelled as multiplicative factors, while the microstructure is modelled as an ARMA noise process. Following an analytical and empirical combined approach, we find a strong relationship between low entropy and high relative tick size and that volatility is responsible for the largest amount of regularity, averaging 62% of the total regularity against 18% of the intraday pattern regularity and 20% of the microstructure.

arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.04199

L.M. Calcagnile, G. Bormetti, M. Treccani, S. Marmi, F. Lillo, Collective synchronization and high frequency systemic instabilities in financial markets, Quantitative Finance 18 (2), 237-247

We present some empirical evidence on the dynamics of price instabilities in financial markets and propose a new Hawkes modelling approach. Specifically, analysing the recent high frequency dynamics of a set of US stocks, we find that since 2001 the level of synchronization of large price movements across assets has significantly increased. We find that only a minor fraction of these systemic events can be connected with the release of pre-announced macroeconomic news. Finally, the larger is the multiplicity of the event—i.e. how many assets have swung together—the larger is the probability of a new event occurring in the near future, as well as its multiplicity. To reproduce these facts, due to the self- and cross-exciting nature of the event dynamics, we propose an approach based on Hawkes processes. For each event, we directly model the multiplicity as a multivariate point process, neglecting the identity of the specific assets. This allows us to introduce a parsimonious parametrization of the kernel of the process and to achieve a reliable description of the dynamics of large price movements for a high-dimensional portfolio.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14697688.2017.1403141

G. Bormetti, L. M. Calcagnile, M. Treccani, F. Corsi, S. Marmi, F. Lillo, Modelling systemic price cojumps with Hawkes factor models , Quantitative Finance 15 (7), 1137-1156

Instabilities in the price dynamics of a large number of financial assets are a clear sign of
systemic events. By investigating portfolios of highly liquid stocks, we find that there are a
large number of high-frequency cojumps. We show that the dynamics of these jumps is
described neither by a multivariate Poisson nor by a multivariate Hawkes model. We
introduce a Hawkes one-factor model which is able to capture simultaneously the time
clustering of jumps and the high synchronization of jumps across assets.