Statistical Mechanics of Conventional Traders May Lead to Non-Conventional Market Behavior

We describe the main idea and the conceptual architecture of a platform for simulating a large number of asynchronously interacting agents in continuous time. We show how the generic capabilities of the platform apply to the simulation of realistic stock market interactions. A particular example of a very dramatic market event that took place in Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) on September 20, 2002 is used to uncover the parameters characterizing the classical investor types within the market. The simple microscopic rules governing the individual agents behavior are shown to result in a collective market behavior similar to the one of a damped harmonic oscillator. Specifically, the aggregated influence of the fundamentalist traders is formally related to Hooke's law while the behavior of the trend followers corresponds to inertia and viscous friction forces.