News and price returns from threshold behaviour and vice-versa: exact solution of a simple agent-based market model

Starting from an exact relationship between news, threshold and price return distributions in the stationary state, I discuss the ability of the Ghoulmie-Cont-Nadal model of traders to produce fat-tailed price returns. Under normal conditions, this model is not able to transform Gaussian news into fat-tailed price returns. When the variance of the news so small that only the players with zero threshold can possibly react to news, this model produces Levy-distributed price returns with a -1 exponent. In the special case of super-linear price impact functions, fat-tailed returns are obtained from well-behaved news.