We propose a new set of stylized facts quantifying the structure of financial
markets. The key idea is to study the combined structure of both investment
strategies and prices in order to open a qualitatively new level of
understanding of financial and economic markets. We study the detailed order
flow on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China for the whole year of 2003.
There is convincing evidence showing that the probability distributions of
stock returns in mature markets exhibit power-law tails and both the positive
and negative tails conform to the inverse cubic law. It supports the
possibility that the tail exponents are universal at least for mature markets
in the sense that they do not depend on stock market, industry sector, and
market capitalization. We investigate the distributions of one-minute intraday
returns of all the A-share stocks traded in the Chinese stock market, which is
the largest emerging market in the world.
We study the dynamics of order flows around large intraday price changes
using ultra-high-frequency data from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. We find a
significant reversal of price for both intraday price decreases and increases
with a permanent price impact. The volatility, the volume of different types of
orders, the bid-ask spread, and the volume imbalance increase before the
extreme events and decay slowly as a power law, which forms a well-established
peak.