Analysis of the temporal properties of price shock sequences in crude oil markets

As one of the fundamental energy sources and important chemical raw materials, crude oil is crucially important to every country. Especially, the price shock of crude oil will bring about hidden dangers in energy security and economic security. Therefore, investigating the dynamics of frequent price shocks of crude oil markets seems to be crucial and necessary. In order to make the conclusions more reliable and valid, we use two different representations of the price shocks (inter-event times and series of counts) to study the temporal properties of price shock sequences in crude oil markets, such as coefficient of variation, Allan Factor, Fano Factors, Rescaled Range analysis and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis. We find evidence that the time dynamics of the price shock sequences can be considered as a fractal process with a high degree of time-clusterization of the events. It could give us some useful information to better understand the nature and dynamics of crude oil markets.