As seen in "Digits", the fourth episode of the Netflix series Connected, Benford's Law is applicable to almost every data set that is said to be randomly occurring such as the global financial markets. The law is most frequently used for surveillance and detection of fraud, money laundering, and manipulation of data.
Auditors world-wide have studied and are aware of the phenomenal application of this law and it's magic-like capability to detect accounting, legal, election, or scientific fraud.
Now, Benford's Law can be utilised by anyone and observed across any financial data-set. Apply this to prices, financial data, or health statistics on TradingView! Future releases of this indicator will be fully equipped with time-specific windows to apply Benford's Law and identify price manipulation.
Additionally, tick boxes are available in the settings window to see the data and view each leading digit!
Benford's Law
This is a classical use of the famous Benford's Law. Also called the "Law of Anomalous Numbers" , "First Digit Law", or the "First Digit Phenomenon", Newcomb–Benford law states that in many naturally occurring data sets, the leading digit is more likely to be a low number, despite probabilistic reasoning that each leading digit between 1 and 9 should be uniformly distributed at 11.1%.
For example, in data sets that obey the law, the leading number of 1 occurs approximately 30.1% of the time while the leading digit of 9 occurs only 5% of the time.
The mind-blowing distribution of Benford's Law is as follows.
Most interesting, thank you @GrantPeace . Just glancing for now it also seems periodic, relative to price. hmmm...
FrancescoRenzetti
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nive one. love your work
ICEKI
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Hey GrantPeace, thank you so much for posting this interesting stuff here. As EmpiricalFX mentioned this is a great work. However I am still misunderstand how to use it properly. I think this indicator can be a great one because it could indicate manipulation of the markets. Very outlook for more example and explanation from you!
Thanks for posting sir =D
DasanC
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Love the Pine implementation! Great work. I have to say the concept itself is quite misleading though - more of a spurious correlation than evidence of tampering. Say for example on the Daily chart for EURUSD, you have an occasional 11% change (very abnormal) and frequent 2% or even 0.9% changes (typical). This skews the distribution by a significant amount since the leading digit from the source is not rounded to an integer value. For the 1 occurrence, it shifts by over 5% (or 17% proportionally) for the EURUSD example.
DasanC
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@EmpiricalFX, The 1-minute chart is wild. Maybe it is a sign of fraud/manipulation though?
GrantPeace
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@EmpiricalFX, The 11% change would only result in one count of 1 - just as a change of 0.00014758 would result in one count of 1. :)
The 1 minute chart is very interesting. It may indicate severe manipulation.