I'm using daily stock prices to determine on average how many days pass before the daily price movement of a stock is greater than 1.49 standard deviations in either direction, up or down.
Currently I'm just taking a simple average
spikes = SUM(price > 1.49, 252)
spikes is just the total number of daily price changes greater than 1.49 standard deviations in 252 trading days.
Then I'm just doing
avg = 252 / spikes
This finds a simple average number of days per big spikes in 252 days.
But what I'm finding is sometimes there will be 2, 3, or 4 price spikes in a row that are greater than 1.49 so it seems like this would make the average number of days per big spikes inaccurate if sometimes there's a few in a row. I'm no mathematician, is there a more accurate formula?
There is a whole, very well-developed bit of economic theory that got Richard Engle the Nobel Prize in this area. Stock returns seem to have "clusters" where volatility spikes; the returns aren't necessarily fully stationary, but (speaking loosely) the way in which that happens is the volatility has clusters where it pops up and then dies back down. It is called a GARCH process (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity). Take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_conditional_heteroskedasticity