2011/12/04 by Virasoro, M. A.
#FOS: Economics and business #Statistical Finance (q-fin.ST)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1112.0770
We find a remarkable time persistence of various proxies for the kurtosis (p-kurtosis) of the intraday returns distribution for the S&P500 index and this permits a significant measure of their evolution from 1983 to 2004. There appears a long time scale dramatic variation of the p-kurtosis uncorrelated with the variation of the volatility thus falsifying any hypothesis of a universal shape for the probability distribution of the returns. A large increase in the kurtosis anticipates the October 87 crash. During the years 1991-2003 it continuously decreases even when the volatility grows during the dot-com bubble. We propose some speculative interpretations of these results.