Financial Market Complexity (Economics & Finance)

Rating:
Summary: Lucid, dense and sound econophysics book
Review: This book is written in a very dense fashion and should be compared to a math or physics text and obviously not to the advertised get rich quick books.

The style is very clear and very dense. The introduction says more about the financial market as many long texts. Also the definitions are precise and do contain content. Alone this introduction is worthwhile for anybody in the business of specifying a financial software system. It saves literally weeks of work.

As a next step a very dense overview of the "standard" finance theory is presented (first order Markov...). The authors even succeed to explain the Black Scholes option-pricing model in a few pages. I am very thankful for this.

The main impetus of the authors is to apply complexity theory to financial markets and get in return a good and existing example of a complex system. They look deeply into the limits of the independent and identical distributed probability function assumption. Also higher order correlations, the effect of competing and partly collaborating agents is discussed.

The text is accessible to most graduate students with a corresponding background in mathematics, physics ....