A Benchmark Approach to Quantitative Finance


Book Description

A framework for financial market modeling, the benchmark approach extends beyond standard risk neutral pricing theory. It permits a unified treatment of portfolio optimization, derivative pricing, integrated risk management and insurance risk modeling. This book presents the necessary mathematical tools, followed by a thorough introduction to financial modeling under the benchmark approach, explaining various quantitative methods for the fair pricing and hedging of derivatives.




Contemporary Quantitative Finance


Book Description

This volume contains a collection of papers dedicated to Professor Eckhard Platen to celebrate his 60th birthday, which occurred in 2009. The contributions have been written by a number of his colleagues and co-authors. All papers have been - viewed and presented as keynote talks at the international conference “Quantitative Methods in Finance” (QMF) in Sydney in December 2009. The QMF Conference Series was initiated by Eckhard Platen in 1993 when he was at the Australian - tional University (ANU) in Canberra. Since joining UTS in 1997 the conference came to be organised on a much larger scale and has grown to become a signi?cant international event in quantitative ?nance. Professor Platen has held the Chair of Quantitative Finance at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) jointly in the Faculties of Business and Science since 1997. Prior to this appointment, he was the Founding Head of the Centre for Fin- cial Mathematics at the Institute of Advanced Studies at ANU, a position to which he was appointed in 1994. Eckhard completed a PhD in Mathematics at the Technical University in Dresden in 1975 and in 1985 obtained his Doctor of Science degree (Habilitation degree in the German system) from the Academy of Sciences in Berlin where he headed the Stochastics group at the Weierstrass Institute.




Applied Quantitative Finance


Book Description

This volume provides practical solutions and introduces recent theoretical developments in risk management, pricing of credit derivatives, quantification of volatility and copula modeling. This third edition is devoted to modern risk analysis based on quantitative methods and textual analytics to meet the current challenges in banking and finance. It includes 14 new contributions and presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of cutting-edge methods and topics, such as collateralized debt obligations, the high-frequency analysis of market liquidity, and realized volatility. The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 revisits important market risk issues, while Part 2 introduces novel concepts in credit risk and its management along with updated quantitative methods. The third part discusses the dynamics of risk management and includes risk analysis of energy markets and for cryptocurrencies. Digital assets, such as blockchain-based currencies, have become popular b ut are theoretically challenging when based on conventional methods. Among others, it introduces a modern text-mining method called dynamic topic modeling in detail and applies it to the message board of Bitcoins. The unique synthesis of theory and practice supported by computational tools is reflected not only in the selection of topics, but also in the fine balance of scientific contributions on practical implementation and theoretical concepts. This link between theory and practice offers theoreticians insights into considerations of applicability and, vice versa, provides practitioners convenient access to new techniques in quantitative finance. Hence the book will appeal both to researchers, including master and PhD students, and practitioners, such as financial engineers. The results presented in the book are fully reproducible and all quantlets needed for calculations are provided on an accompanying website. The Quantlet platform quantlet.de, quantlet.com, quantlet.org is an integrated QuantNet environment consisting of different types of statistics-related documents and program codes. Its goal is to promote reproducibility and offer a platform for sharing validated knowledge native to the social web. QuantNet and the corresponding Data-Driven Documents-based visualization allows readers to reproduce the tables, pictures and calculations inside this Springer book.




Risk Measures and Attitudes


Book Description

Risk has been described in the past by a simple measure, such as the variance, and risk attitude is often considered simply a degree of risk aversion. However, this viewpoint is usually not sufficient. Risk Measures and Attitudes collects contributions which illustrate how modern approaches to both risk measures and risk attitudes are inevitably intertwined. The settings under which this is discussed include portfolio choice, mitigating credit risk and comparing risky alternatives. This book will be a useful study aid for students and researchers of actuarial science or risk management as well as practitioners.




Mathematical Finance


Book Description

Taking continuous-time stochastic processes allowing for jumps as its starting and focal point, this book provides an accessible introduction to the stochastic calculus and control of semimartingales and explains the basic concepts of Mathematical Finance such as arbitrage theory, hedging, valuation principles, portfolio choice, and term structure modelling. It bridges thegap between introductory texts and the advanced literature in the field. Most textbooks on the subject are limited to diffusion-type models which cannot easily account for sudden price movements. Such abrupt changes, however, can often be observed in real markets. At the same time, purely discontinuous processes lead to a much wider variety of flexible and tractable models. This explains why processes with jumps have become an established tool in the statistics and mathematics of finance. Graduate students, researchers as well as practitioners will benefit from this monograph.




Implementing Models in Quantitative Finance: Methods and Cases


Book Description

This book puts numerical methods in action for the purpose of solving practical problems in quantitative finance. The first part develops a toolkit in numerical methods for finance. The second part proposes twenty self-contained cases covering model simulation, asset pricing and hedging, risk management, statistical estimation and model calibration. Each case develops a detailed solution to a concrete problem arising in applied financial management and guides the user towards a computer implementation. The appendices contain "crash courses" in VBA and Matlab programming languages.




Portfolio Theory and Arbitrage: A Course in Mathematical Finance


Book Description

This book develops a mathematical theory for finance, based on a simple and intuitive absence-of-arbitrage principle. This posits that it should not be possible to fund a non-trivial liability, starting with initial capital arbitrarily near zero. The principle is easy-to-test in specific models, as it is described in terms of the underlying market characteristics; it is shown to be equivalent to the existence of the so-called “Kelly” or growth-optimal portfolio, of the log-optimal portfolio, and of appropriate local martingale deflators. The resulting theory is powerful enough to treat in great generality the fundamental questions of hedging, valuation, and portfolio optimization. The book contains a considerable amount of new research and results, as well as a significant number of exercises. It can be used as a basic text for graduate courses in Probability and Stochastic Analysis, and in Mathematical Finance. No prior familiarity with finance is required, but it is assumed that readers have a good working knowledge of real analysis, measure theory, and of basic probability theory. Familiarity with stochastic analysis is also assumed, as is integration with respect to continuous semimartingales.




Quantitative Analysis in Financial Markets


Book Description

Contains lectures presented at the Courant Institute's Mathematical Finance Seminar.




Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Financial Markets


Book Description

Swaps, futures, options, structured instruments - a wide range of derivative products is traded in today's financial markets. Analyzing, pricing and managing such products often requires fairly sophisticated quantitative tools and methods. This book serves as an introduction to financial mathematics with special emphasis on aspects relevant in practice. In addition to numerous illustrative examples, algorithmic implementations are demonstrated using "Mathematica" and the software package "UnRisk" (available for both students and teachers). The content is organized in 15 chapters that can be treated as independent modules. In particular, the exposition is tailored for classroom use in a Bachelor or Master program course, as well as for practitioners who wish to further strengthen their quantitative background.




Handbook of the Fundamentals of Financial Decision Making


Book Description

This handbook in two parts covers key topics of the theory of financial decision making. Some of the papers discuss real applications or case studies as well. There are a number of new papers that have never been published before especially in Part II.Part I is concerned with Decision Making Under Uncertainty. This includes subsections on Arbitrage, Utility Theory, Risk Aversion and Static Portfolio Theory, and Stochastic Dominance. Part II is concerned with Dynamic Modeling that is the transition for static decision making to multiperiod decision making. The analysis starts with Risk Measures and then discusses Dynamic Portfolio Theory, Tactical Asset Allocation and Asset-Liability Management Using Utility and Goal Based Consumption-Investment Decision Models.A comprehensive set of problems both computational and review and mind expanding with many unsolved problems are in an accompanying problems book. The handbook plus the book of problems form a very strong set of materials for PhD and Masters courses both as the main or as supplementary text in finance theory, financial decision making and portfolio theory. For researchers, it is a valuable resource being an up to date treatment of topics in the classic books on these topics by Johnathan Ingersoll in 1988, and William Ziemba and Raymond Vickson in 1975 (updated 2 nd edition published in 2006).