Volatility cluster and herding

Stock markets can be characterized by fat tails in the volatility distribution, clustering of volatilities and slow decay of their time correlations. For an explanation models with several mechanisms and consequently many parameters as the Lux–Marchesi model have been used. We show that a simple herding model with only four parameters leads to a quantitative description of the data. As a new type of data we describe the volatility cluster by the waiting time distribution, which can be used successfully to distinguish between different models.