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June 22, 2003
Didier Sornette

Fig. 6 extends figure 3 by performing a sensitivity analysis on the 'zero-phase' Weierstrass-type function, in order to assess the reliability and range of uncertainty of the prediction. Using the fit shown in black solid lines in figure 3, we have generated 10 realizations of an artificial S&P500 by adding A GARCH noise to the black solid line. GARCH means "generalized auto-regressive conditional heteroskedasticity". It is a process often taken as a benchmark in the financial industry and describes the fact that volatility is persistent. The innovations of the used GARCH noise have been drawn from a Student distribution with 3 degrees of freedom with a variance equal to that of the residuals of the fit of the real data by the black continuous curve, to ensure the agreement between these synthetic time series and the known properties of the empirical distribution of returns. Using the GARCH noise improves on our previous synthetic tests of last month by using a more realistic correlated noise process. We have then fitted each of these 10 synthetic noisy clones of the S&P500 (shown as the blue dots) by our 'zero-phase' Weierstrass-type function. This yields the narrow bundle of 10 curves shown here in magenta. This bundle of predictions is very coherent and suggests a good robustness of the prediction. The typical width of the blue dots give a sense of the variability that can be expected around this most probable scenario. The real S&P500 price trajectory is shown as the red wiggly line.

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