# All Questions

3answers
170 views

### Implied Probability of Default from Bond Prices

I am trying to build out a probability of default model for a bond. Given the current price of a bond and the current risk free rate, I am trying to calculate the probability of default. So assume a ...
1answer
81 views

### Replicating the short part of a long-short trade using inverse ETFs

I devised a pair trading strategy going long XXX and short B*YYY. B is the quantity of shares of YYY I need to short. The problem is I can’t go short on YYY, but there is an inverse ETF for YYY ...
1answer
54 views

### Weighting several returns over different time frames

I have a set of annualized returns over 4 time periods: 10yr, 5yr, 3yr and 1yr. Is there a way to weight each return to have a "more representative" return?
1answer
98 views

### Arbitrage Strategy Proof in Bjork

In Tomas Bjork's Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time (or here), $\exists$ this proposition Proposition 2.9 Suppose that a claim X is reachable with replicating portfolio h. Then any price at t=0 of ...
3answers
759 views

### cointegration applied to Portfolio Construction & Risk management

There are all sorts of applications of cointegration to generating alpha on mean-reverting timeseries: comparing spot vs. futures, bond spreads, identifying mean-reverting residuals, etc. But there ...
1answer
69 views

### how to calculate avarage variance and avarage covariance

I would like to figure out how to calculate av.variance and av.cov. I know how to calculate portfolio variance( for large ...
1answer
307 views

### Hedging a Long Equity Swap by Shorting the Stock

Suppose that I enter an Equity Swap, such that I pay a floating rate and I receive the equity return. The payment is every one year for both the rate and the return, and the swap expires in one year. ...
0answers
67 views

1answer
466 views

### Pricing a FixedRateBond in Quantlib: yield vs TermStructure

I am trying to price a simple U.S. treasury in QuantLib, using two methods. The first method calls FixedRatebond.dirtyPrice(...), passing in a YTM and other parameters. The second method involves ...
1answer
153 views

### Short-term directional trading

Did value of ratio between informed and uninformed traders at market, making difference to profitability of short-term directional trading on that market? My guess is yes and better play short-term ...
3answers
266 views

### CDS Spreads and Equity Volatility

Why does CDS spreads track the implied volatility on equities? What is the fundamental relationship that would keep the two inline from deviating too far from each other? My speculation: Could it be ...
1answer
280 views

### PDF Calculation by Fourier Inversion of Characteristic Function for Affine Intensity Process in Matlab

I'm trying to use the Fourier inversion formula to plot the PDF of an Affine Stochastic Intensity Reduced Form Credit Model, given its characteristic function. The characteristic function of an ...
1answer
108 views

### Swaptions vol trading lognormally

What does this mean: "Front-end vols have been trading lognormally while longer tails have traded normally." I read this in a research report, in the context of ...
0answers
24 views

### How do derivatives affect capital structures?

Yesterday, I was at a lecture where the speaker said that the impact of derivatives was often to make senior debt, in effect, subordinated debt (in terms of priority, recovery rates, etc.)? How do ...
1answer
867 views

### robust open source Kalman filter library in C++

I would like to know if anyone has experience with a good open source kalman filter implementation in C++ that I could use. I require an implementation that supports computation of likelihood similar ...
2answers
114 views

### Is the purchase of a stock publicly accessible?

If an investor bought a stock, could another private party access that information anywhere? Does the SEC/exchange itself create a real time/ historical record of who holds what stocks, and is that ...
1answer
47 views

### What does 2 Year Annualized mean compared to 1 Year Annualized

I am looking at a company's financial report and there is a table in it that lists returns over different annualized periods. It ranges from 1 year to 20 years. Would a 2 year return in this table be ...
1answer
154 views

### Electricity market : how to design an optimal hedging strategy using spot and futures markets for an industrial consumer?

Here is the problem : we should adopt the point of view of an industrial company which purchases electricity as an input in its production line and which wants to achieve the following two goals : ...
2answers
98 views

### Basis Risk for Futures/Options

I am just reading about basis risk. It is being described as risk of the price of the hedging instrument not fluctuating the same as the instrument itself. I was just wondering, if we bought a ...
1answer
203 views

0answers
57 views

### Kalman Filtering with Linear Restrictions

A question on this topic has been asked before: Combining a linear Kalman Filter with additional linear constraints? and I checked out some of the references given: ...
1answer
48 views

### Which more topic should be covered in my undergraduate program? [closed]

Below is the topics covered in my undergraduate economics program. I want to know which course should I take to get a full overview of topics in finance today. Econometrics Micro, Macro Economics ...
0answers
77 views

### Option payoffs and replicating payoffs

I've come across the below question which has no answers to it and I was hoping someone could provide some help. I know it quite a long question and I appreciate any help with this. An investment ...
1answer
129 views

### Intuitive understanding of Black-Scholes pricing

The Black-Scholes formula entails market completeness, so the price of an option is only the cost associated with dynamically hedging the option. Where does this cost come from? I don't see how ...
4answers
2k views

### C# Broker API for FX Trading

I am looking for a broker who provides a free trading API for FX. The goal is to develop at-home algorithms in C# (possibly Qt) to run on a fake portfolio, and then later on real money with ...
2answers
504 views

### Forex brokers with free API compatible with Node.js

I have a Forex trading signal generator written in Node.js and now I am looking for a Forex broker with a free Node.js compatible API. The requirements are simple: be able to send new trade orders ...
1answer
138 views

### Are there any good benchmarks for performance of vanilla option pricing code?

I've seen parsec (http://parsec.cs.princeton.edu/index.htm), which has a PDE pricing component, but the distribution is enormous and I haven't bothered to try to download it for review. I'm ...
1answer
139 views

### Debt vs. Equity?

What determines whether an investment should be made using debt vs. equity? For example, startups are often financed with equity, while mortgages are always financed using debt. What characteristics ...
2answers
144 views

### BInary Option implied volaltility

How is implied vol calculated if the quoted prices are out of the range for any possible volatility? E.g. Current quote on CBOE for options expiring on Aug 16, 2014 ...
1answer
173 views

### What is PCA and how does it relate to eigenvectors and eigenvalues?

What are the principal components? How they are calculated? What is their relationship with eigenvalues and eigenvectors? This is a lead-in question to explain PCA basics. EDIT: PCA is implemented ...
4answers
188 views

### Does an implied volatility always exist for a binary option?

I'm trying to compute the implied volatility of a binary option but I cannot get some of the strikes to reach a convergent solution using either a Monte Carlo pricing model or an analytical Black ...
1answer
175 views

### Controling ex-post volatility by ex-ante limits

In the context of mutual funds the KID directive forces us to calculate 5 year ex-post volatility of a (market) fund (weekly returns). Thus each week we look back in the past and calculate volatility ...
4answers
2k views

### Is there any good research on support and resistance?

Could somebody advise me on where to find good literature on the justification or motivation for using support and resistance lines - and also lines of maximums and minimums. In finance, it is ...
0answers
157 views

### The option values are different from two r package - foptions,rquantlib

The results are very different.I know the code from quantlib and the result of quantlib seem right(close to market price). Is there anyone know why the value from fOptions is so large or fOptions used ...
1answer
364 views

### Optimal trading strategy in toy world of simple Hidden Markov model with Gaussians

I want to solve the following optimization problem: What is the optimal general trading strategy (in the sense of the highest Sharpe ratio) on a time series which is the result of a Hidden Markov ...
0answers
27 views

3answers
2k 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 ...
1answer
356 views

### Directional/Non-Directional Risk

Can someone explain to me what is direction/non-directional risk? Went through few sites but couldn't understand much.

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