  Researchers have used from 30 days to several years of daily returns as
source data for clustering financial time series based on their correlations.
This paper sets up a statistical framework to study the validity of such
practices. We first show that clustering correlated random variables from their
observed values is statistically consistent. Then, we also give a first
empirical answer to the much debated question: How long should the time series
be? If too short, the clusters found can be spurious; if too long, dynamics can
be smoothed out.
