Autocorrelation

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What is Autocorrelation?
Autocorrelation is a mathematical concept used to measure the degree of similarity between a given time series and a lagged version of itself over successive time intervals. Mathematically, it is the correlation of a signal with a delayed copy of itself as a function of delay. In simpler terms, autocorrelation helps us understand whether and how past values in a time series are related to future values.

Autocorrelation in Finance:
In finance, the autocorrelation is a tool used to analyze the behavior of time series data, such as asset prices or returns. It can reveal "patterns", trends, or cycles within the data.

• Price Autocorrelation: When applied to prices, autocorrelations can indicate whether an asset price tends to follow a trend. On price you will typically observe positive autocorrelation because price often exhibits a momentum effect where today's price is positively correlated with past prices. As a result, when prices are trending, they tend to continue in the same direction, creating a positive autocorrelation.
  
• Returns Autocorrelation: Returns on the other hand, generally show less autocorrelation than prices. This is because returns represent the change in prices over time, and in efficient markets, returns are often modeled as a random walk, leading to low or no significant autocorrelation. However, under certain market conditions, you may observe positive or negative autocorrelation in returns. Positive Autocorrelation of returns indicates a trend effect, where past returns can predict future returns. Negative Returns Autocorrelation suggest mean reversion, where large positive returns are often followed by negative returns and vice versa.
  

Critical Value Analysis:
This indicator comes with critical values based on user-selected confidence levels (90%,95%,99%). It assesses whether the autocorrelation at a particular lag is statistically significant, which is crucial for distinguishing between random noise and meaningful events.

Trading Based on Autocorrelation:
While this indicator was not really developed to be directly used for trading, this indicator is was instead to raise awareness on why you should avoid strategies involving mean reversion on price.