Eur. Phys. J. B 57, 81-87 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00158-7

Quantifying bid-ask spreads in the Chinese stock market using limit-order book data

Intraday pattern, probability distribution, long memory, and multifractal nature

¹ School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, P.R. China
² School of Science, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, P.R. China
³ Shenzhen Stock Exchange, 5045 Shennan East Road, Shenzhen, 518010, P.R. China
⁴ Research Center of Systems Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a wxzhou@ecust.edu.cn

Received: 5 January 2007
Revised: 19 April 2007
Published online: 1 June 2007

Abstract

The statistical properties of the bid-ask spread of a frequently traded Chinese stock listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange are investigated using the limit-order book data. Three different definitions of spread are considered based on the time right before transactions, the time whenever the highest buying price or the lowest selling price changes, and a fixed time interval. The results are qualitatively similar no matter linear prices or logarithmic prices are used. The average spread exhibits evident intraday patterns consisting of a big L-shape in morning transactions and a small L-shape in the afternoon. The distributions of the spread with different definitions decay as power laws. The tail exponents of spreads at transaction level are well within the interval (2,3) and that of average spreads are well in line with the inverse cubic law for different time intervals. Based on the detrended fluctuation analysis, we found the evidence of long memory in the bid-ask spread time series for all three definitions, even after the removal of the intraday pattern. Using the classical box-counting approach for multifractal analysis, we show that the time series of bid-ask spread do not possess multifractal nature.