If the bag is still… attention!

2001/05/25 Carton Virto, Eider - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Matematika
• Softwarea
• Giza zientziak

Before defeating Wall Street in October 1929, for example, Yale University economist Irving Fisher said that the American economy had definitely reached a "high plateau." Three years later, U.S. national income was halved and the time of the Great Depression came.

The controversies on Black Monday of October 19, 1987 have not yet been concluded. Economists do not agree that strong stock declines are a reflection of the market's own instability or are initiated by external events. According to Oxford University researcher David Lamper, large losses are due in most cases to internal changes in the system. The Lamper team has prepared a model capable of predicting large stock decline, capable of detecting the instability that is about to arrive within a system.

They consider that the changes are a consequence of the interactions between the agents of the system, since each seller receives the influence of what others do, both for the collective behavior that is given directly on the stock market and for the adaptations of the prices that occur indirectly as a result of this behavior. This interdependence makes the entire system sensitive to very small changes. The truth is that there are changes that no one stands out and others that cause earthquakes. The problem is to guess who it is.

According to the Lamper model, if the market is moving between specific and fixed limits and short-term fluctuations are expected to occur within those limits with some reliability, be careful! This market situation is a sign of an immediate change, the calm before the storm. Lamper believes that times of easy to predict stock fluctuations are a sign that we are at the door of major changes and is not the only one. Ricardo Mansilla, of the University of Mexico, has drawn conclusions in favor of the same idea analyzing the behavior of financial markets. On the other hand, the model of Lamper is able to predict quite well the direction and magnitude of the changes.

However, the model of the Lamper group has not been made expressly for the financial markets. It is also applicable to any system of units that compete for obtaining limited resources, such as an ecosystem, a computer network or a bacterial colony.