The Emergence of Critical Stocks in Market Crash

Abstract

In complex systems like financial market, risk tolerance of individuals is crucial for system resilience. The single-security price limit, designed as risk tolerance to protect investors by avoiding sharp price fluctuation, is blamed for feeding market panic in times of crash. The relationship between the critical market confidence which stabilizes the whole system and the price limit is therefore an important aspect of system resilience. Using a simplified dynamic model on networks of investors and stocks, an unexpected linear association between price limit and critical market confidence is theoretically derived and empirically verified in this paper. Our results highlight the importance of relatively “small” but critical stocks that drive the system to collapse by passing the failure from periphery to core. These small stocks, largely originating from homogeneous investment strategies across the market, has unintentionally suppressed system resilience with the exclusive increment of individual risk tolerance. Imposing random investment requirements to mitigate herding behavior can thus improve the market resilience.