Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology
Society's drive toward ever faster socio-technical systems, means that there is an urgent need to understand the threat from 'black swan' extreme events that might emerge. On 6 May 2010, it took just five minutes for a spontaneous mix of human and machine interactions in the global trading cyberspace to generate an unprecedented system-wide Flash Crash. However, little is known about what lies ahead in the crucial sub-second regime where humans become unable to respond or intervene sufficiently quickly. Here we analyze a set of 18,520 ultrafast black swan events that we have uncovered in stock-price movements between 2006 and 2011. We provide empirical evidence for, and an accompanying theory of, an abrupt system-wide transition from a mixed human-machine phase to a new all-machine phase characterized by frequent black swan events with ultrafast durations (
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| Date of creation: | Feb 2012 |
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| Handle: | RePEc:arx:papers:1202.1448 |
| Contact details of provider: | Web page: http://arxiv.org/
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- David Easley & Marcos M. López de Prado & Maureen O'Hara, 2012. "Flow Toxicity and Liquidity in a High-frequency World," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(5), pages 1457-1493.
- Lux, T. & M. Marchesi, . "Scaling and Criticality in a Stochastic Multi-Agent Model of a Financial Market," Discussion Paper Serie B 438, University of Bonn, Germany, revised Jul 1998.
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