We propose a new set of stylized facts quantifying the structure of financial markets. The key idea is to study the combined structure of both investment strategies and prices in order to open a qualitatively new level of understanding of financial and economic markets. We study the detailed...

We present the symmetric thermal optimal path (TOPS) method to determine the time-dependent lead-lag relationship between two stochastic time series. This novel version of the previously introduced TOP method alleviates some inconsistencies by imposing that the lead-lag relationship should be...

We present a general methodology to incorporate fundamental economic factors to our previous theory of herding to describe bubbles and antibubbles. We start from the strong form of Rational Expectation and derive the general method to incorporate factors in addition to the log-periodic power law...

We study a dynamical Ising model of agents' opinions (buy or sell) with coupling coefficients reassessed continuously in time according to how past external news (magnetic field) have explained realized market returns. By combining herding, the impact of external news and private information, we...

We analyze 27 house price indexes of Las Vegas from Jun. 1983 to Mar. 2005, corresponding to 27 different zip codes. These analyses confirm the existence of a real-estate bubble, defined as a price acceleration faster than exponential, which is found however to be confined to a rather limited...

We apply two non-parametric methods to test further the hypothesis that log-periodicity characterizes the detrended price trajectory of large financial indices prior to financial crashes or strong corrections. The analysis using the so-called (H,q)-derivative is applied to seven time series...

Following a long tradition of physicists who have noticed that the Ising model provides a general background to build realistic models of social interactions, we study a model of financial price dynamics resulting from the collective aggregate decisions of agents. This model incorporates...

We tested 45 indices and common stocks traded in the South African stock market for the possible existence of a bubble over the period from Jan. 2003 to May 2006. A bubble is defined by a faster-than-exponential acceleration with significant log-periodic oscillations. The faster-than-exponential...

We analyze the quarterly average sale prices of new houses sold in the USA as a whole, in the northeast, midwest, south, and west of the USA, in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia of the USA, to determine whether they have grown faster-than-exponential which we take as the...

We have recently introduced the ``thermal optimal path'' (TOP) method to investigate the real-time lead-lag structure between two time series. The TOP method consists in searching for a robust noise-averaged optimal path of the distance matrix along which the two time series have the greatest...