According to the bivariate mixture hypothesis (BMH) as proposed by Tauchen and Pitts (1983) and Harris (1986,1987) the daily price changes and the correspond-ing trading volume on speculative markets follow a joint mixture of distributions with the unobservable number of daily information events...

Most of the empirical applications of the stochatic volatility (SV) model are based on the assumption that the conditional distribution of returns given the latent volatility process is normal. In this paper the SV model based on a conditional normal distribution is compa-red with SV...