Detecting financial bubbles with tail-weighted entropy

This paper develops a novel entropy-based framework to quantify tail risk and detect speculative bubbles in financial markets. By integrating extreme value theory with information theory, I introduce the Tail-Weighted Entropy (TWE) measure, which captures how information scales with extremeness in asset price distributions. I derive explicit bounds for TWE under heavy-tailed models and establish its connection to tail index parameters, revealing a phase transition in entropy decay rates during bubble formation. Empirically, I demonstrate that TWE-based signals detect crises in equities, commodities, and cryptocurrencies days earlier than traditional variance-ratio tests, with Bitcoin’s 2021 collapse identified weeks prior to the peak. The results show that entropy decay—not volatility explosions—serves as the primary precursor to systemic risk, offering policymakers a robust tool for preemptive crisis management.