Swiss Federal Institute of Technology econophysicists discovered an unambiguous signature of a bubble market about to collapse in the form of super-exponential growth decorated with logarithmic oscillations, and used this method to predict the collapse of several bubbles in the last few years, including the collapse of the oil bubble last year and the US housing market in 2006.

Their method is a synthesis of ideas from the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, from the imitation and herding behaviour of investors and traders and from the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions.