Fractal markets: Liquidity and investors on different time horizons

In this paper, we propose a new agent-based model to study the source of liquidity and the ‘‘emergent’’ phenomenon in financial market with fractal structure. Themodel rests on fractal market hypothesis and agents with different time horizons of investments. What is interesting is that though the agent-based model reveals that the interaction between these heterogeneous agents affects the stability and liquidity of the financial market the real world market lacks detailed data to bring it to light since it is difficult to identify and distinguish the investors with different time horizons in the empirical approach. results show that in a relatively short period of time fractal market provides liquidity from investors with different horizons and themarket gains stability when themarket structure changes from uniformity to diversification. In the real world the fractal structure with the finite of horizons can only stabilize the market within limits. With the finite maximum horizons, the greater diversity of the investors and the fractal structure will not necessarily bringmore stability to themarket whichmight comewith greater fluctuation in large time scale. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.