An autocatalytic network model for stock markets

•We model the dynamics of Boolean network to apply in financial market.•The model is applied to the actual data for stock market.•The states of network are binary and represent financial return.•It is possible to note the pattern of stocks observing behavior of network.

The stock prices of companies with businesses that are closely related within a specific sector of economy might exhibit movement patterns and correlations in their dynamics. The idea in this work is to use the concept of autocatalytic network to model such correlations and patterns in the trends exhibited by the expected returns. The trends are expressed in terms of positive or negative returns within each fixed time interval. The time series derived from these trends is then used to represent the movement patterns by a probabilistic boolean network with transitions modeled as an autocatalytic network. The proposed method might be of value in short term forecasting and identification of dependencies. The method is illustrated with a case study based on four stocks of companies in the field of natural resource and technology.