Identifying dominant economic sectors and stock markets: A social network mining approach

Abstract

We propose a method to identify dominant economic sectors and stock markets using a social network approach to mining stock market data. Closing price data from January 1998 through January 2011 of 2698 stocks selected from 17 major stock market indices have been used in the analysis. A Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) has been constructed using the cross-correlations between weekly returns of the stocks. The MST has been chosen to obtain a simplified but connected network having linkages among similarly behaving stocks and it constitutes a social network of stocks for our study. The macroscopic interdependence networks among economic sectors as well as among stock markets have been derived from the microscopic linkages among stocks in the MST. The analysis of these derived macroscopic networks demonstrates that the European and the North American stock markets and Financial, Industrials, Materials, and Consumer Discretionary economic sectors dominate in the global stock markets. © Springer-Verlag 2013.