The scientific study of complex systems has transformed a wide range of disciplines in recent years, enabling researchers in both the natural and social sciences to model and predict phenomena as diverse as earthquakes, global warming, demographic patterns, financial crises, and the failure of...

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...

Drawdowns (loss from the last local maximum to the next local minimum) offer a more natural measure of real market risks than the variance, the value-at-risk or other measures based on fixed time scale distributions of returns. Here, we extend considerably our previous analysis of drawdowns by...