Recent empirical research has uncovered regularities in financial fluctuations. Those are: (i) the cubic law of returns: returns follow a power law distribution with exponent 3; (ii) the half cubic law of volumes: volumes follow a power law distribution with exponent 32; (iii) Approximate cubic law...

We compare our results on empirical analysis of financial data with simulations of two stochastic models of the dynamics of stock market prices. The two models are (i) the truncated Lévy flight recently introduced by us and (ii) the ARCH(1) and GARCH(1,1) processes. We find that the TLF well...

This paper examines whether we can improve the predictability of financial return series by exploiting the effect of cross-correlations among different financial markets. We forecast financial return series based on the support vector machines (SVM) method, which can surpass the random-walk...

The unique scaling behavior of financial time series have attracted the research interest of physicists. Variables such as stock returns, share volume, and number of trades have been found to display distributions that are consistent with a power-law tail. We present an overview of recent...

We present numerical simulations of two-dimensional models of electric breakdown and fracture in disordered systems subject to an increasing external stress. We provide a geometrical characterization of the damage by studying the scaling behavior of connected bonds clusters. The average cluster...

Financial markets exhibit a complex hierarchy among different processes, e.g. a trading time marks the initiation of a trade, and a trade triggers a price change. High-frequency trading data arrive at random times. By combining stochastic and agent-based approaches, we develop a model for...

A thermodynamical formalism for resistor networks is developed in order to extract full information on the multifractal scaling structure. We introduce a matrix representation and study the moments of the voltage distribution Z̃(β) = ∑i=1N|Vi|β α N -F̄(β) where N is the number of...

This manuscript is based on four opening lectures, which were designed to offer a brief and somewhat parochial overview of some “exotic” statistical physics puzzles of possible interest to biophysicists, medical physicists, and econophysicists. These include the statistical properties of DNA...

We discuss some apparently “universal” aspects observed in the empirical analysis of stock price dynamics in financial markets. Specifically we consider (i) the empirical behavior of the return probability density function and (ii) the content of economic information in financial time series.

We perform Monte Carlo simulations to determine the average excluded area 〈Aex〉 of randomly oriented squares, randomly oriented widthless sticks and aligned squares in two dimensions. We find significant differences between our results for randomly oriented squares and previous analytical...