Long term memory in extreme returns of financial time series

It is well known that while daily price returns of financial markets are uncorrelated, their absolute values ('volatility') are long-term correlated. Here we provide evidence that certain subsequences of the returns themselves also exhibit long-term memory. These subsequences consist of maxima (or minima) of returns in consecutive time windows of R days. Our analysis shows that for both stocks and currency exchange rates, long-term correlations are significant for R ≥ 4. We argue that this long-term memory which is similar to that observed in volatility clustering sheds further insight on price dynamics that might be used for risk estimation.