# All Questions

522 views

### Why are there so many different ways of calculating historical volatility

There appears to be several ways of calculating volatility: Price volatility (of which there are several variants): close to close high low range average of open, high, low and close Log returns ...
1k views

I overheard someone at work today talking about a commodity spread option pricing model and he was asking our quant if he should use price volatility instead of return volatility as the volatility ...
2k views

### Is Visual Basic a fast enough for millisecond orders

I have an API that for an order routing platform that is in visual basic. The maximum frequency or orders to exchanges will be milliseconds, where the underlying systems are expected to be able to ...
118 views

### How to remove the risk element from a set of fixed rate mortgage offerings?

Kept waiting in the bank yesterday, with no paint to watch dry, I found myself staring at the mortgage rates. (These are all annual interest rates): Variable: 2.475% 1 year: 2.90% 2 years: 3.05% 3 ...
635 views

### How to minimize the difference between a parametric VaR and a MC-VaR with lognormal assumption?

Given that we want to find the Value at Risk for a portfolio of stocks only, there are two main methods to proceed. In the problem, we also assume that stocks follow a geometric Brownian motion. A ...
841 views

### Where can I find data on the interbank lending market?

Where can I find disaggregated interbank lending data (i.e. bank A lends to bank B x money at y rate)? I could only find data on interest rates. I would accept LIBOR market data as well as any ...
21k views

### Calculating log returns using R

I am trying to calculate the log returns of a dataset in R using the usual log differencing method. However, the calculated data is simply a vector of zeroes. I can't see what I'm doing wrong. Here ...
5k views

### What causes the call and put volatility surface to differ?

I currently have a local volatility model that uses the standard Black Scholes assumptions. When calculating the volatility surface, what causes the difference between the call volatility surface, ...
818 views

### How to compute performance attribution between daily rebalanced strategies?

I have a daily rebalanced portfolio of several strategies. After one month, I now want to attribute the performance to the different strategies. There are several ways to do it. For instance one ...
2k views

### Maximization of CARA utility function: unique solution with an unbounded parameter?

An investor at time $t_0$ can invest his wealth $w_0$ in a risky asset $x$ for an amount $a$ and the remain part in the riskless asset $w_0-a$. At the end of the period $t_1$, the investor will ...
1k views

### How to simulate correlated assets for illustrating portfolio diversification?

I have seen multiple instances where people try to explain the diversification effects of having assets with a certain level of correlation, especially in the "most diversified portfolio" literature. ...
1k views

### What is the best way to forecast prepayment rate in an emerging market mortgage loan portfolio?

I constructed a model to forecast the prepayment rates for a mortgage loan portfolio (of mortgages in an emerging market) using probit regression on factors such as loan-to-value, PTI, time from ...
834 views

### How to manage equity portfolio risk intraday?

Lets assume that I have an equity strategy that generates signals intraday to buy and sell. I run this strategy across the SP500 names. Now within my strategy I want to incorporate a method to help me ...
2k views

### Home/hobbyist quant trading - possible to profitable or just an intellectual hobby? [closed]

I've been researching algorithmic (non discretionary) trading at the several-day to month timescale, i.e. not HFT. I am not interested in voodoo i.e. no technical analysis, I am looking for solid ...
16k views

### Why does the minimum variance portfolio provide good returns?

I've been a researching minimum variance portfolios (from this link) and find that by building MVPs adding constraints on portfolio weights and a few other tweaks to the methods outlined I get ...
7k views

### R: How feasible is it to store — and work with — tick data in a database connected to R?

I'm looking to convert some tickdata .csv files into a database on a local disk and then use R to call the data and do my various analytics and modelling. What are some best practices / ...
978 views

### A gentle introduction to cointegration [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: What is the intuition behind cointegration? Although having a postgrad degree in mathematics, I haven't used any maths 'in anger' for quite a few years now, so I am quite ...
478 views

### Is there a measure for the 'degree' of cointegration

Is there a standard (or maybe even intuitive?) way of ranking pairs of cointegrated time series so that one could make statements like the following: ...
327 views

### What drives changes in implied volatility on ETFs/ETNs?

I thought implied volatility, as well as the VIX, primarily increase due to increases in the underlying asset's volatility, as well as the options themselves being bid up because more people were ...
726 views

### How to run an asset replication regression?

I am doing extensive research on portfolio replication and was hoping to get some help with some problems I am encountering. I am running a regression between 2 assets that I believe replicate ...
1k views

### How to model the daily return using intraday data?

Say, I have hourly returns $r_1,r_2,...,r_T$, where $r_t$ = $ln(p_t)$ - $ln(p_0)$ for $t = 1...T$. So what is the value of $E[r_t]$? Would $r_T$ be the $\prod{(r_t)}$? Basically $r_t$s are the ...
2k views

### How to obtain true probabilities from Black-Scholes?

How to obtain true probabilities from Black-Scholes option pricing equation? Suppose, that we know risk adjusted discount rate for the underlying asset (the drift term in the physical measure) and ...
1k views

### what is the best way to calculate the probability of an equity option ending in the money?

Given historical implied volatility and all other know variables (stock price, option strike price, option expiration date, dividend rate, interest rate) what is the best way to calculate the ...
140 views

### Should we apply practical constraints on the distribution of monte carlo paths?

to limit interest rate paths to a 'reasonable' range (if we could define reasonable). Now we calibrate log-normal skew and mean reversion monthly to robust basket of atm swaptions and in and out caps....
1k views

### From a high frequency point of view, with a price prediction and assuming infinite leverage, how do you determine optimal trade size?

I have read about something like Kelly criterion for long term expectation maximization assuming a fixed starting bankroll. But if one can assume unlimited leverage, and one has a signal for a price ...
595 views

### Demonstration of Ito's correction term/lemma in binomial tree

I am preparing an undergraduate QuantFinance lecture. I want to demonstrate the ideas of Ito's correction term and Ito's lemma in the most accessible manner. My idea is to take the "working horse" of ...
3k views

### Has spectrum analysis ever been used successfully to analyse historical price data?

Spectrum analysis is often used to analyse waveforms. A common configuration, for example, is to create a graph where X is time, Y is frequency, and the brightness of each position represents ...
465 views

### How to calculate time-segmented volume? [closed]

amibrokers has this calculation for TSV: ...
498 views

### What is the correct procedure to choose the lag when preforming Johansen cointegration test?

When preforming Johansen cointegration test for 2 time series (the simple case) you need to decide the lag you want to use. Doing the test for different lag levels returns different results: for some ...
290 views

### RMT (Random Matrix Theory) issue with callibrating MP distribution -

I am seeing an issue when callibrating an MP distribution. Assume a log return series for the SP500 with the following dimensions dim(xts.sp500.ret.stocksonly) ==> [1] 1133 478 ...
837 views

### Does random matrix theory (RMT) for returns' correlation matrices apply if there are high correlations?

Steps to replicate: Take the correlation matrix of a sample of stocks in the SP500, or a set of ETF's that are include some that are highly correlated (0.7 and above). Problem observed: I observe ...
2k views

### How to use macroeconomic indicators for long/short trading strategies?

I am trying to understand how to use macroeconomic data in my trading. I understand that using such data could be used to gauge an overall view of the market and how it's doing as a whole. I have been ...
571 views

### Can duration gap analysis be applied to mortgages?

Can a mortgage loan be treated like a bond and its duration calculated using the bond duration formula? More precisely, can I calculate the loan portfolio duration for duration gap analysis, with ...
1k views

### How does “time segmented volume” differ from on-balance volume?

Worden Brothers Inc. advertise a proprietary indicator called Time Segmented Volume. This gizmo seems closely to resemble On Balance Volume. Is there any reason to think that TSV might yield a more ...
1k views

### Can we replicate a call option without borrowing and make it cheaper in this way?

I learned how to price a European call option using this video lecture. The considered case is very simple. The call option gives the right to buy 100 Euros for 100 Dollars in one month from now. The ...
490 views

### Any research paper on stop loss?

Has there been any rigorous study on stop loss ? When to apply it? Has it been shown to work through proper statistical backtests? I am interested in Equities, preferably European stocks.
823 views

### What benchmark/index to use for backtesting a portfolio of stock options?

What benchmark should I use for backtesting a model for when I should buy an option of a particular stock? For equities, one could say their portfolio outperformed the S&P 500. I would like to ...
4k views

### What C++ math libraries are typically used by quants?

Before you mark question as off-topic, please read it - it is, actually, quant-related. Basically, I'm working on an app that spits out a lot of C++ math. When it comes to simple things like ...
457 views

### What is the optimal strategy when there is an equal chance for gain or loss but the size of the potential gain is larger?

I'm investigating a situation where the chance for gain or loss is the same, but the amount gained is greater than the amount that is lost. For example, the gain would be about 30% of the trade ...
718 views

### One dimensional analog of cleansing a correlation matrix via random matrix theory

The general idea of cleansing a correlation matrix via random matrix theory is to compare its eigenvalues to that of a random one to see which parts of it are beyond normal randomness. These are then ...
180 views

### Can a higher P/E ratio be beneficial under certain circumstances? [closed]

I am new to investing. I understand that the P/E ratio along with other data can be used to determine whether a stock may or may not be undervalued. Are there situations where a HIGH P/E is actually ...
964 views

### Can you fully hedge an option in the presence of counterparty risk?

The derivation of the Black-Scholes model assumes no counterparty risk. Does the presence of counterparty risk invalidate the argument behind the model? EDIT: The question is about options in general,...
2k views

### How do different methods and techniques used in pairs trading compare?

I was going through the paper of Avellaneda (2008) on stat arb and I found it interesting that he uses asset returns vs. their respective ETFs to compute the s-score. I am wondering if anyone has ...
2k views

### Is equity market making a game of speed?

I have always felt that equity market making was a speed game for HFTs. But recently I talked to someone on the buy side, who made a claim to the contrary. He argued that with the right market making ...
1k views

### How can higher co-moments be applied to portfolio optimization in an asset allocation context?

Traditional portfolio optimization involves mean variance optimization, where only the mean and covariance matrix of returns are estimated. What asset allocation and portfolio optimization techniques ...
677 views

### How to account for jumps in intraday data when calculating beta?

I am calculating betas on intraday trade data at 15-minute intervals. For simplicity sake, let's assume I am modeling $$Y = \beta * X + c$$ where $Y$ is the return of XLF ...
2k views

### Why do expected return models and risk models use different factors?

This is a question responding to weekly topic challenge. I happen to see an interesting question from SYMMYS by Michael Kapler. I always approached expected return and risk modeling as separate ...
3k views

### How do you mix quantitative asset allocation with qualitative views?

Usually in asset allocation you have a quantitative approach (which can be from example mean-variance), but you (or you and your firm) also have a more qualitative approach given market-conditions, ...
The classic mean-variance optimization problem tries to minimize variance of a portfolio for a given expected return:  \underset{w}{\arg \min} \quad w^T \Sigma w \quad \text{s.t} \quad \mu^Tw \geq \...