We study a rational expectation model of bubbles and crashes. The model has two components: (1) our key assumption is that a crash may be caused by local self-reinforcing imitation between noise traders. If the tendency for noise traders to imitate their nearest neighbors increases up to a...

We argue that the word ``critical'' in the title is not purely literary. Based on our and other previous work on nonlinear complex dynamical systems, we summarize present evidence, on the Oct. 1929, Oct. 1987, Oct. 1987 Hong-Kong, Aug. 1998 global market events and on the 1985 Forex event, for...

The Nasdaq Composite fell another $\approx 10 %$ on Friday the 14'th of April 2000 signaling the end of a remarkable speculative high-tech bubble starting in spring 1997. The closing of the Nasdaq Composite at 3321 corresponds to a total loss of over 35% since its all-time high of 5133 on the...

In a series of papers based on analogies with statistical physics models, we have proposed that most financial crashes are the climax of so-called log-periodic power law signatures (LPPL) associated with speculative bubbles (Sornette and Johansen, 1998; Johansen and Sornette, 1999; Johansen et al. 1999;...

In a series of papers based on analogies with statistical physics models, we have proposed that most financial crashes are the climax of so-called log-periodic power law signatures (LPPS) associated with speculative bubbles. In addition, a large body of empirical evidence supporting this...

The Nasdaq fell another (approximately) 10% on Friday the 14th of April 2000 signaling the end of a remarkable speculative high-tech bubble starting in spring 1997. The closing of the Nasdaq at 3321 corresponds to a total loss of over 35% since its all-time high of 5133 on the 10th of March...

We clarify the status of log-periodicity associated with speculative bubbles preceding financial crashes. In particular, we address Feigenbaum's [2001] criticism and show how it can be rebuked. Feigenbaum's main result is as follows: quot;the hypothesis that the log-periodic component is present...

Drawdowns (loss from the last local maximum to the next local minimum) are essential aspects of risk assessment in investment management. They offer a more natural measure of real market risks than the variance or other cumulants of daily (or some other fixed time scale) distributions of...

In January 1999, the authors published a quantitative prediction that the Nikkei index should recover from its 14 year low in January 1999 and reach approximately 20,500 a year later. The purpose of the present paper is to evaluate the performance of this specific prediction as well as the...

We present a synthesis of all the available empirical evidence in the light of recent theoretical developments for the existence of characteristic log-periodic signatures of growing bubbles in a variety of markets including 8 unrelated crashes from 1929 to 1998 on stock markets as diverse as the...