Fundamentalists Clashing over the Book: A Study of Order-Driven Stock Markets

Abstract

Agent-based models of market dynamics must strike a compromise between the structural assumptions that represent the trading mechanism and the behavioral assumptions that describe the rules by which traders take their decisions. We present a structurally detailed model of an order- driven stock market and show that a minimal set of behavioral assumptions suffices to generate a leptokurtic distribution of short- term log-returns. This result backs up the conjecture that the emergence of some statistical properties of financial time series is due to the microstructure of stock markets.price dynamics, statistical properties of returns, behavioral and structural assumptions, agent-based simulations