Dynamics of price and trading volume in a spin model of stock markets with heterogeneous agents

The dynamics of a stock market with heterogeneous agents is discussed in the framework of a recently proposed spin model for the emergence of bubbles and crashes. We relate the log-returns of stock prices to magnetization in the model and find that it is closely related to trading volume as observed in real markets. The cumulative distribution of log-returns exhibits scaling with exponents steeper than 2 and scaling is observed in the distribution of transition times between bull and bear markets. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.