It includes exemplars from statistical physics with an emphasis on emergent or collective properties of financial markets.
Statistical finance is concerned with emergent properties arising from systems with many interacting agents and as such attempts to explain price anomalies in terms of the collective behaviour.
First, traders create largely noise, not long range correlations among themselves, except when they all buy or all sell, such as during a popular IPO or during a crash.
Even if the notion of a thermodynamics equilibrium is considered not at the level of the agents but in terms of collections of instruments stable configurations are not observed.
It has been suggested that what is required is a change in mindset within finance and economics that moves the field towards methods of natural science.