Many fits of Hawkes processes to financial data look rather good but most of them are not statistically significant. This raises the question of what part of market dynamics this model is able to account for exactly. We document the accuracy of such processes as one varies the time interval of...

Sharpe ratios are much used in finance, yet cannot be measured directly because price returns are non-Gaussian. On the other hand, the number of records of a discrete-time random walk in a given time-interval follows a Gaussian distribution provided that its increment distribution has finite...

We discuss a simple model based on the Minority Game which reproduces the main stylized facts of anomalous fluctuations in finance. We present the analytic solution of the model in the thermodynamic limit and show that stylized facts arise only close to a line of critical points with non-trivial...

Constant and symmetric price impact functions, most commonly used in agent-based market modelling, are shown to give rise to paradoxical and inconsistent outcomes in the simplest case of arbitrage exploitation when open-hold-close actions are considered. The solution of the paradox lies in the...

Starting from an exact relationship between news, threshold and price return distributions in the stationary state, I discuss the ability of the Ghoulmie-Cont-Nadal model of traders to produce fat-tailed price returns. Under normal conditions, this model is not able to transform Gaussian news...

We present and study a Minority Game based model of a financial market where adaptive agents -- the speculators -- interact with deterministic agents -- called producers. Speculators trade only if they detect predictable patterns which grant them a positive gain. Indeed the average number of...

We report a statistical analysis of the Island ECN (NASDAQ) order book. We determine the static and dynamic properties of this system, and then analyze them from a physicist's viewpoint using an equivalent particle system obtained by treating orders as massive particles and price as position. We...

Constant price impact functions, much used in financial literature, are shown to give rise to paradoxical outcomes since they do not allow for proper predictability removal: for instance the exploitation of a single large trade whose size and time of execution are known in advance to some...

Using non-linear machine learning methods and a proper backtest procedure, we critically examine the claim that Google Trends can predict future price returns. We first review the many potential biases that may influence backtests with this kind of data positively, the choice of keywords being...

We check the claims that data from Google Trends contain enough data to predict future financial index returns. We first discuss the many subtle (and less subtle) biases that may affect the backtest of a trading strategy, particularly when based on such data. Expectedly, the choice of keywords...