Disrupting Finance


Book Description

This open access Pivot demonstrates how a variety of technologies act as innovation catalysts within the banking and financial services sector. Traditional banks and financial services are under increasing competition from global IT companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon and PayPal whilst facing pressure from investors to reduce costs, increase agility and improve customer retention. Technologies such as blockchain, cloud computing, mobile technologies, big data analytics and social media therefore have perhaps more potential in this industry and area of business than any other. This book defines a fintech ecosystem for the 21st century, providing a state-of-the art review of current literature, suggesting avenues for new research and offering perspectives from business, technology and industry.




Portfolio Risk Analysis


Book Description

Portfolio risk forecasting has been and continues to be an active research field for both academics and practitioners. Almost all institutional investment management firms use quantitative models for their portfolio forecasting, and researchers have explored models' econometric foundations, relative performance, and implications for capital market behavior and asset pricing equilibrium. Portfolio Risk Analysis provides an insightful and thorough overview of financial risk modeling, with an emphasis on practical applications, empirical reality, and historical perspective. Beginning with mean-variance analysis and the capital asset pricing model, the authors give a comprehensive and detailed account of factor models, which are the key to successful risk analysis in every economic climate. Topics range from the relative merits of fundamental, statistical, and macroeconomic models, to GARCH and other time series models, to the properties of the VIX volatility index. The book covers both mainstream and alternative asset classes, and includes in-depth treatments of model integration and evaluation. Credit and liquidity risk and the uncertainty of extreme events are examined in an intuitive and rigorous way. An extensive literature review accompanies each topic. The authors complement basic modeling techniques with references to applications, empirical studies, and advanced mathematical texts. This book is essential for financial practitioners, researchers, scholars, and students who want to understand the nature of financial markets or work toward improving them.




Machine Learning for Asset Managers


Book Description

Successful investment strategies are specific implementations of general theories. An investment strategy that lacks a theoretical justification is likely to be false. Hence, an asset manager should concentrate her efforts on developing a theory rather than on backtesting potential trading rules. The purpose of this Element is to introduce machine learning (ML) tools that can help asset managers discover economic and financial theories. ML is not a black box, and it does not necessarily overfit. ML tools complement rather than replace the classical statistical methods. Some of ML's strengths include (1) a focus on out-of-sample predictability over variance adjudication; (2) the use of computational methods to avoid relying on (potentially unrealistic) assumptions; (3) the ability to "learn" complex specifications, including nonlinear, hierarchical, and noncontinuous interaction effects in a high-dimensional space; and (4) the ability to disentangle the variable search from the specification search, robust to multicollinearity and other substitution effects.




Machine Learning for Asset Management


Book Description

This new edited volume consists of a collection of original articles written by leading financial economists and industry experts in the area of machine learning for asset management. The chapters introduce the reader to some of the latest research developments in the area of equity, multi-asset and factor investing. Each chapter deals with new methods for return and risk forecasting, stock selection, portfolio construction, performance attribution and transaction costs modeling. This volume will be of great help to portfolio managers, asset owners and consultants, as well as academics and students who want to improve their knowledge of machine learning in asset management.




Implementing Machine Learning for Finance


Book Description

Bring together machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) in financial trading, with an emphasis on investment management. This book explains systematic approaches to investment portfolio management, risk analysis, and performance analysis, including predictive analytics using data science procedures. The book introduces pattern recognition and future price forecasting that exerts effects on time series analysis models, such as the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, Seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA) model, and Additive model, and it covers the Least Squares model and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. It presents hidden pattern recognition and market regime prediction applying the Gaussian Hidden Markov Model. The book covers the practical application of the K-Means model in stock clustering. It establishes the practical application of the Variance-Covariance method and Simulation method (using Monte Carlo Simulation) for value at risk estimation. It also includes market direction classification using both the Logistic classifier and the Multilayer Perceptron classifier. Finally, the book presents performance and risk analysis for investment portfolios. By the end of this book, you should be able to explain how algorithmic trading works and its practical application in the real world, and know how to apply supervised and unsupervised ML and DL models to bolster investment decision making and implement and optimize investment strategies and systems. What You Will Learn Understand the fundamentals of the financial market and algorithmic trading, as well as supervised and unsupervised learning models that are appropriate for systematic investment portfolio management Know the concepts of feature engineering, data visualization, and hyperparameter optimization Design, build, and test supervised and unsupervised ML and DL models Discover seasonality, trends, and market regimes, simulating a change in the market and investment strategy problems and predicting market direction and prices Structure and optimize an investment portfolio with preeminent asset classes and measure the underlying risk Who This Book Is For Beginning and intermediate data scientists, machine learning engineers, business executives, and finance professionals (such as investment analysts and traders)




Powering the Digital Economy: Opportunities and Risks of Artificial Intelligence in Finance


Book Description

This paper discusses the impact of the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the financial sector. It highlights the benefits these technologies bring in terms of financial deepening and efficiency, while raising concerns about its potential in widening the digital divide between advanced and developing economies. The paper advances the discussion on the impact of this technology by distilling and categorizing the unique risks that it could pose to the integrity and stability of the financial system, policy challenges, and potential regulatory approaches. The evolving nature of this technology and its application in finance means that the full extent of its strengths and weaknesses is yet to be fully understood. Given the risk of unexpected pitfalls, countries will need to strengthen prudential oversight.




Machine Learning for Financial Risk Management with Python


Book Description

Financial risk management is quickly evolving with the help of artificial intelligence. With this practical book, developers, programmers, engineers, financial analysts, risk analysts, and quantitative and algorithmic analysts will examine Python-based machine learning and deep learning models for assessing financial risk. Building hands-on AI-based financial modeling skills, you'll learn how to replace traditional financial risk models with ML models. Author Abdullah Karasan helps you explore the theory behind financial risk modeling before diving into practical ways of employing ML models in modeling financial risk using Python. With this book, you will: Review classical time series applications and compare them with deep learning models Explore volatility modeling to measure degrees of risk, using support vector regression, neural networks, and deep learning Improve market risk models (VaR and ES) using ML techniques and including liquidity dimension Develop a credit risk analysis using clustering and Bayesian approaches Capture different aspects of liquidity risk with a Gaussian mixture model and Copula model Use machine learning models for fraud detection Predict stock price crash and identify its determinants using machine learning models




Artificial Intelligence in Financial Markets


Book Description

As technology advancement has increased, so to have computational applications for forecasting, modelling and trading financial markets and information, and practitioners are finding ever more complex solutions to financial challenges. Neural networking is a highly effective, trainable algorithmic approach which emulates certain aspects of human brain functions, and is used extensively in financial forecasting allowing for quick investment decision making. This book presents the most cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI)/neural networking applications for markets, assets and other areas of finance. Split into four sections, the book first explores time series analysis for forecasting and trading across a range of assets, including derivatives, exchange traded funds, debt and equity instruments. This section will focus on pattern recognition, market timing models, forecasting and trading of financial time series. Section II provides insights into macro and microeconomics and how AI techniques could be used to better understand and predict economic variables. Section III focuses on corporate finance and credit analysis providing an insight into corporate structures and credit, and establishing a relationship between financial statement analysis and the influence of various financial scenarios. Section IV focuses on portfolio management, exploring applications for portfolio theory, asset allocation and optimization. This book also provides some of the latest research in the field of artificial intelligence and finance, and provides in-depth analysis and highly applicable tools and techniques for practitioners and researchers in this field.




Machine Learning for Risk Calculations


Book Description

State-of-the-art algorithmic deep learning and tensoring techniques for financial institutions The computational demand of risk calculations in financial institutions has ballooned and shows no sign of stopping. It is no longer viable to simply add more computing power to deal with this increased demand. The solution? Algorithmic solutions based on deep learning and Chebyshev tensors represent a practical way to reduce costs while simultaneously increasing risk calculation capabilities. Machine Learning for Risk Calculations: A Practitioner’s View provides an in-depth review of a number of algorithmic solutions and demonstrates how they can be used to overcome the massive computational burden of risk calculations in financial institutions. This book will get you started by reviewing fundamental techniques, including deep learning and Chebyshev tensors. You’ll then discover algorithmic tools that, in combination with the fundamentals, deliver actual solutions to the real problems financial institutions encounter on a regular basis. Numerical tests and examples demonstrate how these solutions can be applied to practical problems, including XVA and Counterparty Credit Risk, IMM capital, PFE, VaR, FRTB, Dynamic Initial Margin, pricing function calibration, volatility surface parametrisation, portfolio optimisation and others. Finally, you’ll uncover the benefits these techniques provide, the practicalities of implementing them, and the software which can be used. Review the fundamentals of deep learning and Chebyshev tensors Discover pioneering algorithmic techniques that can create new opportunities in complex risk calculation Learn how to apply the solutions to a wide range of real-life risk calculations. Download sample code used in the book, so you can follow along and experiment with your own calculations Realize improved risk management whilst overcoming the burden of limited computational power Quants, IT professionals, and financial risk managers will benefit from this practitioner-oriented approach to state-of-the-art risk calculation.




Empirical Asset Pricing


Book Description

An introduction to the theory and methods of empirical asset pricing, integrating classical foundations with recent developments. This book offers a comprehensive advanced introduction to asset pricing, the study of models for the prices and returns of various securities. The focus is empirical, emphasizing how the models relate to the data. The book offers a uniquely integrated treatment, combining classical foundations with more recent developments in the literature and relating some of the material to applications in investment management. It covers the theory of empirical asset pricing, the main empirical methods, and a range of applied topics. The book introduces the theory of empirical asset pricing through three main paradigms: mean variance analysis, stochastic discount factors, and beta pricing models. It describes empirical methods, beginning with the generalized method of moments (GMM) and viewing other methods as special cases of GMM; offers a comprehensive review of fund performance evaluation; and presents selected applied topics, including a substantial chapter on predictability in asset markets that covers predicting the level of returns, volatility and higher moments, and predicting cross-sectional differences in returns. Other chapters cover production-based asset pricing, long-run risk models, the Campbell-Shiller approximation, the debate on covariance versus characteristics, and the relation of volatility to the cross-section of stock returns. An extensive reference section captures the current state of the field. The book is intended for use by graduate students in finance and economics; it can also serve as a reference for professionals.