An empirical data analysis of “price runs” in daily financial indices: Dynamically assessing market geometric distributional behavior

In financial time series there are time periods in which market indices values or assets prices increase or decrease monotonically. We call those events “price runs”, “elementary uninterrupted trends” or just “uninterrupted trends”. In this paper we study the distribution of the duration of uninterrupted trends for the daily indices DJIA, NASDAQ, IPC and Nikkei 225 during the period of time from 10/30/1978 to 08/07/2020 and we compare the simple geometric statistical model with [Image: see text] consistent with the EMH to the empirical data. By a fitting procedure, it is found that the geometric distribution with parameter [Image: see text] provides a good model for uninterrupted trends of short and medium duration for the more mature markets; however, longest duration events still need to be statistically characterized. Estimated values of the parameter p were also obtained and confirmed by calculating the mean value of p fluctuations from empirical data. Additionally, the observed trend duration distributions for the different studied markets are compared over time by means of the Anderson-Darling (AD) test, to the expected geometric distribution with parameter [Image: see text] and to a geometric distribution with a free parameter p, making possible to assess and compare different market geometric behavior for different dates as well as to measure the fraction of time runs duration from studied markets are consistent with the geometric distribution with [Image: see text] and in parametric free way.