New dynamics between volume and volatility

Understanding, quantifying and predicting market fluctuation has become increasingly important in recent decades. Volatility and volume are the two commonly used quantities to study the market dynamics and the relationship between these two has been modeled and debated for years with several hypothesis been put forward. Using empirical data, we investigate the causality and correlation between volume and volatility and find new ways in which they interact, particularly when the levels of both are high. We find that the volume-conditional volatility distribution scales with volume as a power-law function with an exponential cutoff. We exploit the characteristics of a volume-volatility scatterplot and find a strong correlation between logarithmic volume and a quantity we define as local maximum volatility (LMV), the highest volatility observed in a given range of volume. This supports our empirical analysis, showing that volume is an effective parameter for prediction of the maximum value of volatility for both same-day and near-future time periods. The joint conditional probability of volume and volatility also indicates if we invoke both quantities, the prediction of the largest next-day volatility will be better than invoking either one alone. This approach is thus a greatly improved method of risk assessment.