An artificial financial market with fundamentalists and trend followers

In this master thesis we will investigate an agent-based artificial financial market designed by Hendri Adriaens (2008). We will use his model as a benchmark and investigate how well different specifications of an economy consisting of fundamentalistsand trend followers performs in terms of reproducing the stylized facts of asset returns of Cont (2001). We compare multiple simulations of each specification with each other and with the benchmark model. We find that an artificial financial market consisting of fundamentalists and trend followers, with heterogeneous adjustment speeds and rates of discounting old asset prices, can reproduce some additional stylized facts that are not reproduced by the benchmark model, most notably no autocorrelation in returns and gain/loss asymmetry.