The paper reports on a study of the feedback effects induced by portfolio optimizers on the underlying asset prices. Through their interaction with reference traders, who trade based on some aggregate incomes process, they are assumed to move asset prices away from the standard log-normal model....

We consider a model of the economy that splits investors into two groups. One group (the reference traders) trades an underlying asset according to the difference in realized returns between that asset and some evolving consensus estimate of those returns; the other group (hedgers) hedge...