Detecting the traders' strategies in Minority-Majority games and real stock-prices

The unprecedented access offered by the World Wide Web brings with it the potential to gather huge amounts of data on human activities. Here we exploit this by using a toy model of financial markets, the Minority Game (MG), to investigate human speculative trading behaviour and information capacity. Hundreds of individuals have played a total of tens of thousands of game turns against computer-controlled agents in the Web-based_Interactive Minority Game_. The analytical under...

We introduce a simple extension of the minority game in which the market rewards contrarian (resp. trend-following) strategies when it is far from (resp. close to) efficiency. The model displays a smooth crossover from a regime where contrarians dominate to one where trend-followers dominate. In the intermediate phase, the stationary state is characterized by non-Gaussian features as well as by the formation of sustained trends and bubbles.

A new simple model of financial market is proposed, based on the sequential and inter-temporal nature of trader-trader interaction, and on a new simple trading strategy space. In this pattern-based speculation model, the traders open and close their positions explicitly. Information ecology is strikingly similar to that of the Minority Game which suggest to reinterpret the latter as a model of synchronisation of predictability exploitation. Naive and sophisticated agents are ...

The minority game (MG) model introduced recently provides promising insights into the understanding of the evolution of prices, indices and rates in the financial markets. In this paper we perform a time series analysis of the model employing tools from statistics, dynamical systems theory and stochastic processes. Using benchmark systems and a financial index for comparison, several conclusions are obtained about the generating mechanism for this kind of evolut ion. The moti...

Using virtual stock markets with artificial interacting software investors, aka agent-based models (ABMs), we present a method to reverse engineer real-world financial time series. We model financial markets as made of a large number of interacting boundedly rational agents. By optimizing the similarity between the actual data and that generated by the reconstructed virtual stock market, we obtain parameters and strategies, which reveal some of the inner workings of the targe...

We review the recent approaches to modelling financial markets based on multi-agent systems. After a brief summary of the basic stylised facts observed in real-market time-series we discuss some simple agent-based systems which are currently used to model financial markets. One of the most prominent examples is here the Minority Game (MG), which we address in some more detail. After a brief discussion of its basic setup and general phenomenology we summarise the main findings...

In this paper it was developed a modification of the known multiagent model Minority Game, designed to simulate the behavior of traders in financial markets and the resulting price dynamics on the abstract resource. The model was implemented in the form of software. The modified version of Minority Game was investigated with the aim of reproducing the basic properties of real financial time series. It was proved that such properties as the clustering of volatility, the Levy d...

In this paper, we present a simple stock market model (the market game) which incorporates, as ab initio dynamics delayed majority dynamics, according to which agents (with heterogeneous strategies and price expectations) are rewarded if their actions at time t are the actions of the majority of agents at time t+1. We observe that for a range of parameter settings, minority dynamics are dynamically induced in this game, despite the fact that they are not introduced ab initio....

We address the question of market efficiency using the Minority Game (MG) model. First we show that removing unrealistic features of the MG leads to models which reproduce a scaling behavior close to what is observed in real markets. In particular we find that i) fat tails and clustered volatility arise at the phase transition point and that ii) the crossover to random walk behavior of prices is a finite size effect. This, on one hand, suggests that markets operate close to c...

Strategy evaluation schemes are a crucial factor in any agent-based market model, as they determine the agents' strategy preferences and consequently their behavioral pattern. This study investigates how the strategy evaluation schemes adopted by agents affect their performance in conjunction with the market circumstances. We observe the performance of three strategy evaluation schemes, the history-dependent wealth game, the trend-opposing minority game, and the trend-followi...