Global financial crises and market volatility can be perfectly reproduced using nothing but a simple grid of rolling dice.
April 15, 2026
Original Paper
DiceStock: Emergent Market Microstructure from Stochastic Dice Mechanics
SSRN · 6285320
The Takeaway
DiceStock proves that complex market phenomena like fat-tailed returns and liquidity crises emerge from simple stochastic mechanics rather than complex human psychology. Traditionally, financial models rely on heavy behavioral assumptions or fundamental values. This model ignores all of that, using only shared random signals to replicate 'black swan' events. It suggests that market 'chaos' is a structural byproduct of simple interactions. For quants, this implies that the 'noise' in the system might be more important to model than the 'signal' of the actors.
From the abstract
We present DiceStock, a multi-agent market microstructure simulator in which all agent behavior is driven by a 100×100 stochastic dice grid partitioned into 10 functional bands. Each simulation tick, 10,000 dice are independently rolled, producing band-level statistics that govern heterogeneous agent trading strategies, volatility regimes, sentiment dynamics, and shortsqueeze mechanics. Despite the simplicity of the underlying random mechanism, the model reproduces key stylized facts of financia