# All Questions

219 views

### How can one determine approximately what percentage of options trades are buyer-initiated vs. seller-initiated?

How can one determine approximately what percentage of options trades are buyer-initiated vs. seller-initiated? What measures of order flow are available specifically for options, preferably for ...
120 views

### How to handle coupon payments when pricing a bond with an embedded option?

I'm using a binomial tree to price a bond that has an embedded call or put option. On every node that has a coupon payment, do you include the coupon payment then max/min out the value, or do you ...
235 views

### What are the major characteristics of natural gas volatility and options?

Seasonality is a big deal in the natural gas markets. My understanding is that they are broadly divided into summer and winter, with seasonality in both price and the volatility. What does this ...
207 views

### Where can you find data on non-trading stocks?

My data source for end of day prices only gives the prices of the trades during the day. If a stock stops trading/goes out/moves to another exchange|changes symbol. I never hear about this. My ...
2k views

### Why is an inverted yield curve a problem?

Immediately preceding the worst of the financial crisis, my professors all pointed out to me that the yield curve had inverted -- short-term yields were more risky than 20-year or 30-year Treasury ...
35 views

### What are useful indexes for rapid evaluation of country economic risk?

The World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report offers a comprehensive view of individual country risk/reward. There has been an explosion of these types of indexes over the past few years. ...
240 views

383 views

298 views

### Is there data on market participants at a particular moment?

I am looking for data on market participants at a particular moment (or some proxy/approximation). For example, how can I tell whether mostly big players and HFTs are dominating the market in ...
589 views

### How does volatility affect the price of binary options?

In theory, how should volatility affect the price of a binary option? A typical out the money option has more extrinsic value and therefore volatility plays a much more noticeable factor. Now let's ...
712 views

### What tools are used to numerically solve differential equations in Quantitative Finance?

There are a lot of Quantitative Finance models (e.g. Black-Scholes) which are formulated in terms of partial differential equations. What is a standard approach in Quantitative Finance to solve these ...
600 views

### Why is the SABR volatility model not good at pricing a constant maturity swap (CMS)?

I have heard that the SABR volatility model was not good at pricing a constant maturity swap (CMS). How is that?
2k views

### Excellent information source on advanced machine learning / data mining based trading?

I did check the related posts, like this one here. However, given if one already has knowledge in finance, machine learning and statistics, and wants to know something more advanced on machine ...
677 views

### Is Duration really the slope of the Price-Yield curve?

When looking at the Price-vs-Yield graph for a fixed rate instrument, we are often told that the duration is the slope of that curve. But is that really right? Duration is (change in price) divided ...
452 views

### optimal re-balancing strategy with asynchronous alpha signal

You want to construct an optimal portfolio. Let's say you have an alpha signal that arrives with some period (say quarterly). The alpha signal predicts arithmetic returns one-year ahead. You have ...
466 views

### How to calculate compound returns of leveraged ETFs?

Forewarning: this is a complete newbie question :-) I am starting to learn about ETFs by trying to do the numbers. When learning about the compounding effect in leveraged ETFs, I wanted to simulate ...
217 views

### Delta-Omega Hedging [closed]

I am currently trying to understand the in's and out's of options and more specifically hedging. I came across a document that was talking about Delta Hedging which is just making sure the delta of ...
564 views

### How do you distinguish “significant” moves from noise?

How do you distinguish between losses that are within the normal range for day-to-day shifts and situations with a real potential for loss? The specific application I have in mind is pattern ...
2k views

### Recommendations for books to understand the math in quantitative finance papers?

Can anyone recommend books that explain the math used in quantitative finance academic papers?
344 views

Possible Duplicate: What data sources are available online? Is there a free way to download the current prices (and possibly other data) for stocks for various companies? Context: This is ...
438 views

### Empirical or theoretical quant insights that have shaped your thinking?

What are some quant theoretical or empirical insights that have shaped your thinking or provided a deeper conceptual basis for explaining returns and risk?