Detrended fluctuation analysis on spot and futures markets of West Texas Intermediate crude oil

In this paper, we study the auto-correlations and cross-correlations of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil spot and futures return series employing detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA). Scaling analysis shows that, for time scales smaller than a month, the auto-correlations and cross-correlations are persistent. For time scales larger than a month but smaller than a year, the correlations are anti-persistent, while, for time scales larger than a year, the series are neither auto-correlated nor cross-correlated, indicating the efficient operation of the crude oil markets. Moreover, for small time scales, the degree of short-term cross-correlations is higher than that of auto-correlations. Using the multifractal extension of DFA and DCCA, we find that, for small time scales, the correlations are strongly multifractal, while, for large time scales, the correlations are nearly monofractal. Analyzing the multifractality of shuffled and surrogated series, we find that both long-range correlations and fat-tail distributions make important contributions to the multifractality. Our results have important implications for market efficiency and asset pricing models.