English

Hitting Time Distributions in Financial Markets

Physics and Society 2009-11-13 v1 Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability Statistical Finance

Abstract

We analyze the hitting time distributions of stock price returns in different time windows, characterized by different levels of noise present in the market. The study has been performed on two sets of data from US markets. The first one is composed by daily price of 1071 stocks trade for the 12-year period 1987-1998, the second one is composed by high frequency data for 100 stocks for the 4-year period 1995-1998. We compare the probability distribution obtained by our empirical analysis with those obtained from different models for stock market evolution. Specifically by focusing on the statistical properties of the hitting times to reach a barrier or a given threshold, we compare the probability density function (PDF) of three models, namely the geometric Brownian motion, the GARCH model and the Heston model with that obtained from real market data. We will present also some results of a generalized Heston model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/0608201,
  title  = {Hitting Time Distributions in Financial Markets},
  author = {Davide Valenti and Bernardo Spagnolo and Giovanni Bonanno},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0608201},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

14 pages, 6 figures, submitted to EPJ B

R2 v1 2026-07-22T19:12:13.168Z