Spectral Analysis of Time Series Data : Summary

Link to book summary Takeaway : Most of the phenomena in our world are periodic in nature. Yet, econometric courses at undergraduate / graduate level inevitably start from the time domain instead of frequency domain. This book is a great introduction for some one looking to get an overview of frequency domain analysis. All the principles are explained from a regression standpoint in the initial chapters. Discrete Fourier Transforms are gradually introduced to connect various ideas.

Intraday periodicity and volatility persistence in financial markets

The paper titled, “Intraday periodicity and volatility persistence in financial markets”, by Andersen and Bollerslev is a 44 page analysis on volatility modeling and has close to 75 references. This paper is one of the widely quoted papers on intraday volatility modeling. In this post, I will give a brief summary of the main sections of the paper. Introduction Return volatility varies systematically over the trading day and this pattern is highly correlated with the intraday variation of trading volume and bid-ask patterns.

Stylized Facts

The paper titled, “Empirical properties of asset returns: stylized facts and statistical issues”, by Rama Cont presents 11 stylized facts applicable to wide set of assets that should be always in a quant’s working memory. These stylized facts should shape one’s thinking in building financial models. Stylized facts are the statistical properties of asset prices that are common across a wide range of instruments, markets and time periods. They are usually formulated in terms of qualitative properties of asset returns and may not be precise enough to distinguish among different parametric models.