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Distribution of Variance in Trade Volume is Log-Normal

In this notebook, I discover that the variance in trade volume is approximately log-normally distributed. Knowing this lets us make powerful statistical assumptions when constructing trading metrics that involve volume.

Note: I did not mention this in the notebook, but the distribution also holds (equally well) for daily minute data, even for very small intervals (though they may be noisier just due to a smaller sample size): the smallest I tested was twenty minutes.