Re: Could somebody help me with stock market app question?

[Don Snyder]

Paul Johnson wrote:

> What is the Swarm-state-of-the-art in stock market modeling?  Is Swarm a
> part of the picture?  At Swarmfest, Benedikt S. was telling me that some
> folks in our community had been writing market models, and if any of
> them can share their code with me, my student will be grateful.

I'm interested in this area but haven't done any modeling as yet. Your
student might want to check out this announcement regarding the SFI
stock market model:


http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Bulletins/bulletinFall99/news/stockMarket.html


> One problem I see with ASM is that the market is one stock, right?  It
> seems to me the essence of a real life stock market is the opportunity
> to move money from one company to another...


Well, that's a problem or not depending on what you are trying to
model.  The thinking is that some investors try to time the market as a
whole, buying the dips and selling the peaks (but often getting it
backwards).  A one-stock market makes sense for modeling that: the one
stock is a proxy for the S&P500 or some other broad market index.  Other
investors are thought to be asset-allocators who divide their funds
among several (hopefully negatively correlated) stocks and pay less
attention to market swings.  To model that you need to give your
investor agents a portfolio of stocks to choose from and at that point I
suspect the coding of the model could get pretty messy.  Probably a good
approach would be to first give the agent two stocks to allocate
between, get the code for that working properly, then add a third stock,
make necessary modifications, and so on.  

-Don


-- 
Don Snyder(address@hidden)
School of Economics and Business Administration
Saint Mary's College, PO box 4230, Moraga, CA 94585


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