Evolution and anti-evolution in a minimal stock market model

We present a novel microscopic stock market model consisting of a large number of random agents modeling traders in a market. Each agent is characterized by a set of parameters that serve to make iterated predictions of two successive returns. The future price is determined according to the offer and the demand of all agents. The system evolves by redistributing the capital among the agents in each trading cycle. Without noise the dynamics of this system is nearly regular and thereby fails to reproduce the stochastic return fluctuations observed in real markets. However, when in each cycle a small amount of noise is introduced we find the typical features of real financial time series like fat-tails of the return distribution and large temporal correlations in the volatility without significant correlations in the price returns. Introducing the noise by an evolutionary process leads to different scalings of the return distributions that depend on the definition of fitness. Because our realistic model has only very few parameters, and the results appear to be robust with respect to the noise level and the number of agents we expect that our framework may serve as new paradigm for modeling self generated return fluctuations in markets.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Hierarchical Structure in Financial Markets

I find a topological arrangement of stocks traded in a financial market which has associated a meaningful economic taxonomy. The topological space is a graph connecting the stocks of the portfolio analyzed. The graph is obtained starting from the matrix of correlation coefficient computed between all pairs of stocks of the portfolio by considering the synchronous time evolution of the difference of the logarithm of daily stock price. The hierarchical tree of the subdominant ultrametric space associated with the graph provides information useful to investigate the number and nature of the common economic factors affecting the time evolution of logarithm of price of well defined groups of stocks.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures with 7 panel

Identification of clusters of companies in stock indices via Potts super-paramagnetic transitions

The clustering of companies within a specific stock market index is studied by means of super-paramagnetic transitions of an appropriate q-state Potts model where the spins correspond to companies and the interactions are functions of the correlation coefficients determined from the time dependence of the companies' individual stock prices. The method is a generalization of the clustering algorithm by Domany et. al. to the case of anti-ferromagnetic interactions corresponding to anti-correlations. For the Dow Jones Industrial Average where no anti-correlations were observed in the investigated time period, the previous results obtained by different tools were well reproduced. For the Standard & Poor's 500, where anti-correlations occur, repulsion between stocks modify the cluster structure.Comment: 4 pages; changed conten

From market games to real-world markets

This paper uses the development of multi-agent market models to present a unified approach to the joint questions of how financial market movements may be simulated, predicted, and hedged against. We examine the effect of different market clearing mechanisms and show that an out-of-equilibrium clearing process leads to dynamics that closely resemble real financial movements. We then show that replacing the `synthetic' price history used by these simulations with data taken from real financial time-series leads to the remarkable result that the agents can collectively learn to identify moments in the market where profit is attainable. We then employ the formalism of Bouchaud and Sornette in conjunction with agent based models to show that in general risk cannot be eliminated from trading with these models. We also show that, in the presence of transaction costs, the risk of option writing is greatly increased. This risk, and the costs, can however be reduced through the use of a delta-hedging strategy with modified, time-dependent volatility structure.Comment: Presented at APFA2 (Liege) July 2000. Proceedings: Eur. Phys. J. B Latex file + 10 .ps figs. [email protected]

Deep Learning in a Generalized HJM-type Framework Through Arbitrage-Free Regularization

We introduce a regularization approach to arbitrage-free factor-model selection. The considered model selection problem seeks to learn the closest arbitrage-free HJM-type model to any prespecified factor-model. An asymptotic solution to this, a priori computationally intractable, problem is represented as the limit of a 1-parameter family of optimizers to computationally tractable model selection tasks. Each of these simplified model-selection tasks seeks to learn the most similar model, to the prescribed factor-model, subject to a penalty detecting when the reference measure is a local martingale-measure for the entire underlying financial market. A simple expression for the penalty terms is obtained in the bond market withing the affine-term structure setting, and it is used to formulate a deep-learning approach to arbitrage-free affine term-structure modelling. Numerical implementations are also performed to evaluate the performance in the bond market.Comment: 23 Pages + Reference

A prognosis oriented microscopic stock market model

We present a new microscopic stochastic model for an ensemble of interacting investors that buy and sell stocks in discrete time steps via limit orders based on individual forecasts about the price of the stock. These orders determine the supply and demand fixing after each round (time step) the new price of the stock according to which the limited buy and sell orders are then executed and new forecasts are made. We show via numerical simulation of this model that the distribution of price differences obeys an exponentially truncated Levy-distribution with a self similarity exponent mu~5.Comment: 14 pages RevTeX, 5 eps-figures include

Mesoscopic Community Structure of Financial Markets Revealed by Price and Sign Fluctuations

The mesoscopic organization of complex systems, from financial markets to the brain, is an intermediate between the microscopic dynamics of individual units (stocks or neurons, in the mentioned cases), and the macroscopic dynamics of the system as a whole. The organization is determined by "communities" of units whose dynamics, represented by time series of activity, is more strongly correlated internally than with the rest of the system. Recent studies have shown that the binary projections of various financial and neural time series exhibit nontrivial dynamical features that resemble those of the original data. This implies that a significant piece of information is encoded into the binary projection (i.e. the sign) of such increments. Here, we explore whether the binary signatures of multiple time series can replicate the same complex community organization of the financial market, as the original weighted time series. We adopt a method that has been specifically designed to detect communities from cross-correlation matrices of time series data. Our analysis shows that the simpler binary representation leads to a community structure that is almost identical with that obtained using the full weighted representation. These results confirm that binary projections of financial time series contain significant structural information.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure