Firms having similar business activities are correlated. We analyze two different cross-correlation matrices C constructed from (i) 30-min price fluctuations of 1000 US stocks for the 2-year period 1994-95 and (ii) 1-day price fluctuations of 422 US stocks for the 35-year period 1962-96. We find...

We use methods of random matrix theory to analyze the cross-correlation matrix C of price changes of the largest 1000 US stocks for the 2-year period 1994-95. We find that the statistics of most of the eigenvalues in the spectrum of C agree with the predictions of random matrix theory, but there...

We quantitatively investigate the ideas behind the often-expressed adage `it takes volume to move stock prices', and study the statistical properties of the number of shares traded $Q_{\Delta t}$ for a given stock in a fixed time interval $\Delta t$. We analyze transaction data for the largest...

We respond to the issues discussed by Farmer and Lillo (FL) related to our proposed approach to understanding the origin of power-law distributions in stock price fluctuations. First, we extend our previous analysis to 1000 US stocks and perform a new estimation of market impact that accounts...

Scale-free distributions and correlation functions found in financial data are reminiscent of the scale invariance of physical observables in the vicinity of a critical point. Here, we present empirical evidence for a transition phenomenon, accompanied by a symmetry breaking, in the investors'...

We study the distribution of fluctuations over a time scale $\Delta t$ (i.e., the returns) of the S&P 500 index by analyzing three distinct databases. Database (i) contains approximately 1 million records sampled at 1 min intervals for the 13-year period 1984-1996, database (ii) contains 8686...

We address the question of how stock prices respond to changes in demand. We quantify the relations between price change $G$ over a time interval $\Delta t$ and two different measures of demand fluctuations: (a) $\Phi$, defined as the difference between the number of buyer-initiated and...

Stock price changes occur through transactions, just as diffusion in physical systems occurs through molecular collisions. We systematically explore this analogy and quantify the relation between trading activity - measured by the number of transactions $N_{\Delta t}$ - and the price change...

We study the statistical properties of volatility---a measure of how much the market is likely to fluctuate. We estimate the volatility by the local average of the absolute price changes. We analyze (a) the S&P 500 stock index for the 13-year period Jan 1984 to Dec 1996 and (b) the market...

The risk of a credit portfolio depends crucially on correlations between the probability of default (PD) in different economic sectors. Often, PD correlations have to be estimated from relatively short time series of default rates, and the resulting estimation error hinders the detection of a...