Analysis of intra-day fluctuations in the Mexican financial market index

Abstract

In this paper, a statistical analysis of high frequency fluctuations of the IPC, the Mexican Stock Market Index, is presented. A sample of tick--to--tick data covering the period from January 1999 to December 2002 was analyzed, as well as several other sets obtained using temporal aggregation. Our results indicates that the highest frequency is not useful to understand the Mexican market because almost two thirds of the information corresponds to inactivity. For the frequency where fluctuations start to be relevant, the IPC data does not follows any $\alpha$-stable distribution, including the Gaussian, perhaps because of the presence of autocorrelations. For a long range of lower-frequencies, but still in the intra-day regime, fluctuations can be described as a truncated L\'evy flight, while for frequencies above two-days, a Gaussian distribution yields the best fit. Thought these results are consistent with other previously reported for several markets, there are significant differences in the details of the corresponding descriptions.