Monday Markets (the 26th of May)

The life of the SMDIS program returned after an eventful weekend (with a boat-trip to the archipelago of Stockholm and Erik Aurell getting slightly ill) to normal: work and a talk.

Today, Matteo Marsili gave an overview of recent work on multi-asset markets, empirical data, and theoretical modelling. In practice this means that if a lot of investors behave in the same way, that is use a similar strategy to optimize their portfolios, then this starts to have a feed-back effect with the way the market itself acts. As often in these models (Matteo presented two approaches, one "physics-style" and another "economy-style". It was not quite clear how to get from the more complicated latter to the former...) one has the possibility of a transition between a state with large fluctuations and a state with small fluctuations.

Tomorrow we will have an only-working day thanks to a simultaneous bioinformatics event here in Stockholm.