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

Options markets offer an interesting example of the adaptation of a population to a complex environment, through trial and error and by 'natural' selection. Guided by the Black-Scholes theory but constrained by the fact that mispricing leads to arbitrage opportunities, options markets agree on...

The concepts of scale invariance and scaling behavior are now increasingly applied outside their traditional domains of application, the physical sciences. Their application to financial markets, initiated by Mandelbrot in the 1960s, has experienced a regain of interest in the recent years,...

The concepts of scale invariance, self-similarity and scaling have been fruitfully applied to the study of price fluctuations in financial markets. After a brief review of the properties of stable Levy distributions and their applications to market data we indicate the shortcomings of such...

We critically review recent claims that financial crashes can be predicted using the idea of log-periodic oscillations or by other methods inspired by the physics of critical phenomena. In particular, the October 1997 `correction' does not appear to be the accumulation point of a geometric...

The paper contains a phenomenological description of the whole US forward rate curve (FRC), based on data in the period 1990-1996. It is found that the average deviation of the FRC from the spot rate grows as the square-root of the maturity, with a prefactor which is comparable to the spot rate...