This note investigates the causes of the quality anomaly, which is one of the strongest and most scalable anomalies in equity markets. We explore two potential explanations. The "risk view", whereby investing in high quality firms is somehow riskier, so that the higher returns of a quality...

We show that results from the theory of random matrices are potentially of great interest to understand the statistical structure of the empirical correlation matrices appearing in the study of price fluctuations. The central result of the present study is the remarkable agreement between the...

We investigate present some new statistical properties of order books. We analyse data from the Nasdaq and investigate (a) the statistics of incoming limit order prices, (b) the shape of the average order book, and (c) the typical life time of a limit order as a function of the distance from the...

We investigate several statistical properties of the order book of three liquid stocks of the Paris Bourse. The results are to a large degree independent of the stock studied. The most interesting features concern (i) the statistics of incoming limit order prices, which follows a power-law...

Using Trades and Quotes data from the Paris stock market, we show that the random walk nature of traded prices results from a very delicate interplay between two opposite tendencies: strongly correlated market orders that lead to super-diffusion (or persistence), and mean reverting limit orders...

This is a short review in honor of B. Mandelbrot's 80st birthday, to appear in W ilmott magazine. We discuss how multiplicative cascades and related multifractal ideas might be relevant to model the main statistical features of financial time series, in particular the intermittent, long-memory...

This paper contains a phenomenological description of the whole U.S. forward rate curve (FRC), based on an data in the period 1990-1996. We find that the average FRC (measured from the spot rate) grows as the square-root of the maturity, with a prefactor which is comparable to the spot rate...

Estimating and controlling large risks has become one of the main concern of financial institutions. This requires the development of adequate statistical models and theoretical tools (which go beyond the traditionnal theories based on Gaussian statistics), and their practical implementation....

We present compelling empirical evidence for a new interpretation of the Forward Rate Curve (FRC) term structure. We find that the average FRC follows a square-root law, with a prefactor related to the spot volatility, suggesting a Value-at-Risk like pricing. We find a striking correlation...

We present an analysis of the time behavior of the S&P 500 (Standard and Poors) New York stock exchange index before and after the October 1987 market crash and identify precursory patterns as well as aftershock signatures and characteristic oscillations of relaxation. Combined, they all suggest...