We study the average price impact of a single trade executed in the NYSE. After appropriate averaging and rescaling, the data for the 1000 most highly capitalized stocks collapse onto a single function, giving average price shift as a function of trade size. This function increases as a power...

Is the large influence that mutual funds assert on the U.S. financial system spread across many funds, or is it is concentrated in only a few? We argue that the dominant economic factor that determines this is market efficiency, which dictates that fund performance is size independent and fund...

We review an emerging body of work by physicists addressing questions of economic organization and function. We suggest that, beyond simply employing models familiar from physics to economic observables, remarkable regularities in economic data may suggest parts of social order that can usefully...

In this review article, we explore several recent advances in the quantitative modeling of financial markets. We begin with the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and describe how this controversial idea has stimulated a number of new directions of research, some focusing on more elaborate...

The limit order book is a device for storing demand and effecting trades that is the primary mechanism for price formation in most modern financial markets. We study the limit order book under a random process model of order flow, using simulations and an analytic treatment based on a master...

In financial markets an excess of buying tends to drive prices up, and an excess of selling tends to drive them down. This is called market impact. Based on a simplified model for market making, it is possible to derive a unique functional form for market impact. This can be used to formulate a...

Highly optimized tolerance is a model of optimization in engineered systems, which gives rise to power-law distributions of failure events in such systems. The archetypal example is the highly optimized forest fire model. Here we give an analytic solution for this model which explains the origin...

A deterministic trading strategy can be regarded as a signal processing element that uses external information and past prices as inputs and incorporates them into future prices. This paper uses a market maker based method of price formation to study the price dynamics induced by several...

We investigate the problem of learning to play a generalized rock-paper-scissors game. Each player attempts to improve her average score by adjusting the frequency of the three possible responses. For the zero-sum case the learning process displays Hamiltonian chaos. The learning trajectory can...

Physicists have recently begun doing research in finance, and even though this movement is less than five years old, interesting and useful contributions have already emerged. This article reviews these developments in four areas, including empirical statistical properties of prices,...