Episodic nonlinearity in Latin American stock market indices

Abstract

This letter applies the Hinich portmanteau bicorrelation test jointly with the windowed testing procedure to detect nonlinear behaviour in the rate of returns series for seven Latin American stock market indices. Our results suggest that the nonlinear serial dependencies are episodic in nature. All the stock returns series are characterized by few brief periods of highly significant nonlinearity, followed by long time periods in which the returns follow a pure noise process. Our findings help explain why there are difficulties in forecasting asset returns.

Notes

¹ There are few exceptions that, using different methodologies, have analysed stocks returns for one particular Latin American market (see Valdes, 2002 and Arango et al., 2004).

² For a mathematical derivation of this statistics and its small sample properties see Hinich and Patterson (1995) and Hinich (1996).

³ In this study the threshold level was set at 0.01. The level of significance is the bootstrapped thresholds that correspond to 0.01.