In an analysis of the US, the UK, and the German stock market we find a change in the behavior based on the stock's beta values. Before 2006 risky trades were concentrated on stocks in the IT and technology sector. Afterwards risky trading takes place for stocks from the financial sector. We...

The stability of money value is an important requisite for a functioning economy, yet it critically depends on the actions of participants in the market themselves. Here we model the value of money as a dynamical variable that results from trading between agents. The basic trading scenario can...

We apply an asymmetric version of Kirman's herding model to volatile financial markets. In the relation between returns and agent concentration we use the square root law proposed by Zhang. This can be derived by extending the idea of a critical mean field theory suggested by Plerou et al. We...

Stock markets can be characterized by fat tails in the volatility distribution, clustering of volatilities and slow decay of their time correlations. For an explanation models with several mechanisms and consequently many parameters as the Lux-Marchesi model have been used. We show that a simple...

We analyze the stock prices of the S&P market from 1987 until 2012 with the covariance matrix of the firm returns determined in time windows of several years. The eigenvector belonging to the leading eigenvalue (market) exhibits in its long term time dependence a phase transition with an order...

We study some properties of eigenvalue spectra of financial correlation matrices. In particular, we investigate the nature of the large eigenvalue bulks which are observed empirically, and which have often been regarded as a consequence of the supposedly large amount of noise contained in...

In this paper, we consider daily financial data of a collection of different stock market indices, exchange rates, and interest rates, and we analyze their multi-scaling properties by estimating a simple specification of the Markov-switching multifractal model (MSM). In order to see how well the...

This paper addresses the statistical properties of time series driven by rational bubbles a la Blanchard and Watson (1982), corresponding to multiplicative maps, whose study has recently be revived recently in physics as a mechanism of intermittent dynamics generating power law distributions....