After showing that the distribution of the S&P 500's distortion, i.e. the log difference between its real stock market index and its real fundamental value, is bimodal, we demonstrate that agentbased financial market models may explain this puzzling observation. Within these models, speculators...

We propose an empirically motivated financial market model in which speculators rely on trend-following, contrarian and fundamental trading rules to determine their orders. Speculators' probabilistic rule-selection behavior - the only type of randomness in our model - depends on past and future...