# All Questions

258 views

### Heston MC Simulations - Speed up in Matlab

At the moment I am running a Quad Core Xeon PC with 12GB of RAM doing crude MC with 10k scenarios and 1000 time steps. And using fminsearch for calibration, and it takes about half an hour to an hour ...
131 views

### At what volume would you move the price at the opening auction?

At many exchanges the opening price is set using an auction which takes place pre-opening (see here for example). During the auction you are allowed to place orders according to certain rules (you ...
468 views

### Multi Fractals Models

From a quant point of view, how would you explain Multi Fractals Models in few words ? I have the level to take these courses, but won't be able to do it next year, so I want to know what I am ...
226 views

### why banks shall keep short term gap position low?

I'm reading "Insights for Bank Directors" (http://www.stlouisfed.org/col/director/reference_view.htm), a good introduction to commercial banks, based on a virtual bank "Insight". It talks about Gap ...
2k views

### Why using 3 months forward to hedge fx risk on a fund of funds portfolio?

In my previous job, a fund of funds, they used 3 months forward FX contracts (renewed every 3 months) to protect their portfolio against currency risk. If I do understand why forwards are useful for ...
2k views

### How to calculate the implied volatility using the binomial options pricing model

I want to calculate IV for american options with dividends. So far I have found algorithms to calculate the option price given a volatility. Please can you point me to paper or implementation (R, ...
372 views

### Malliavin Calculus

From a quant point of view, how would you explain Malliavin calculus in few words ? I have the level to take these courses, but won't be able to do it next year, so I want to know what I am missing. ...
282 views

### Are minimum-risk and minimum-variance portfolios equivalent?

When reading a paper by DeMiguel and Nogales (2007; http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=911596), I came across the following formulation: Comparing the proposed minimum-risk ...
142 views

### Black-Scholes PDE to heat equation, nonconstant coefficients

Can someone provide me with details or a reference on how to transform the Black-Scholes PDE with nonconstant coefficients (i.e. $r=r\left(S,t\right)$, $\sigma=\sigma\left(S,t\right)$) to the heat ...
244 views

### Volatility Estimation

Let say I ran two strategies and got its weights at each rebalance and equity curves. I would like to combine these systems to get the performance if I were to trade them concurrently from a portfolio ...
150 views

### Required Rate of Return vs Expected Return

I faced a problem that gives the following information: market risk premium, and risk free rate is given You currently have a portfolio of amount of x, beta b1. Now there is a new investment ...
465 views

### Is the price of European put option monotone in volatility if we replace BM in Black-Scholes with a general Levy process?

Under the Black-Scholes model, we have the European put option is $\mathbb{E} [e^{-rt}(K-S_t)]$, where we take $\log(S_t)=X_t$ and $dX_t= \sigma dW_t - \dfrac{1}{2}\sigma^2 dt + rdt$. Here the option ...
263 views

### Volatility Return Distribution/Garch Modeling

For simplicity sake, if stock returns are normally distrusted, would that imply that second moment, variance/volatility, is chi-squared distrusted? If so wouldn't that imply the statistics(employed to ...
193 views

### Initial margin requirement as percentage, not dollar value

Problem from Finan, FM/2 On 12-30-1998, you decided to bet on the January effect. ON that day, you bought 400 shares of Microsoft on margin at the price of 139 per share. The initial margin ...
208 views

### Change option B&S pricing

Consider a market composed by two stocks whose prices $X$ and $Y$ are given by B&S diffusion $$dX_t= \mu X_t dt+ \sigma X_tdW_t$$ $$dY_t= \mu Y_t dt+ \sigma Y_tdB_t$$ Supposing the market is ...
415 views

### Continuous returns for negative roll-adjusted futures data

I've generated roll adjusted notional futures data by adding a roll adjustment to the settlement price then multiplying by contract multiplier through time. For example, for crude oil CL, on 15 March ...
69 views

### Creditworthiness indicator for copula one-factor model

In this paper in equation 15 on page 261 dealing with one factor copula model, one is using creditworthiness indicator as one of a variables. It is defined as Y_c = \sqrt{\rho_c} Z ...
146 views

### Futures Contract Fair Values Accuracy

I have recently been tasked to work on fair value derivation for futures on equity indices (non-US). I know that the FVD function in Bloomberg can have a huge discrepancy from markets: where cheap is ...
198 views

### Block Bootstrapping Relative Returns

I want to run a block bootstrap on the relative returns, but I'm not sure if subtracting the mean is important. A bootstrap sequence is a synthetic sequence generated using the original sequence. If ...
139 views

### Floor and Cap problem

So I have a problem from Marcel Finan's "A Basic Course in the Theory of Interest and Derivative Markets." We are going over floors and caps, covered puts and covered calls. Consider the following ...
744 views

### Usage of Bollinger bands

I looked through several sources on Bollinger bands and I do not see clear recipes of their usage. Wikipedia says "The use of Bollinger Bands varies widely among traders. " QSE discussion seems also ...
106 views

### Quantitative risk management strategy for a large participant in an illiquid market

Are there any practical quantitative risk management strategies for a large participant in an illiquid market with a few dominant players? By a large partcipant I mean someone who has significant ...
271 views

### Risk prediction based on financial statements

I have a profit loss statement and balance sheet with the following fields: Example P&L Turnover420,363 - Cost of sales £118,730 £140,169 - Gross Profit ...
70 views

### FRA-Strategy: Make 3-month and 1-year Excess returns comparable

I am trying to analyze an investment strategy that tries to exploit the empirical difference between forward interest rates and realized spot rates. I am using FRAs to capture the difference. I am ...
279 views

263 views

### Blackbox Optimization + Bootstrapping = Parameter Selection?

Most automated trading systems have a number of embedded parameters such as the lookback periods, entry and exit thresholds, etc. This is like the moving average crossover system or any of the systems ...
475 views

### Mathematical theories of (sub)-optimal trading strategies under “idealized” assumption - price is random process known to trader

The question is NOT about real trading, but about simplified mathematical models for trading. One of the main problems in trading is that asset prices are not correctly described by the some random ...
3k views

### Central Index Key (CIK) of all traded stocks

Is there a way by which I can get a list of CIK of all registered stocks at the SEC?
544 views

### What is the difference between a recovery swap and a CDS?

As I understand it, recovery swaps and CDS are both used to privide hedging against the default risk of a loan. What is the difference between them?
232 views

### What is lagged interest rate?

I am trying to reproduce a plot in "Statistics and Data engineering for Financial Engineering" by D. Ruppert. The author uses the risk free returns data available in the Ecdat package in R. ...
471 views

### Risk Budgets with Target Portfolio Volatility

I'm working through the implementation of a risk budgeting approach as described in the recent Roncalli paper. The idea is that the portfolio manager sets a contribution of total portfolio volatility ...
2k views

### What does the prefix PX stand for on a Bloomberg Terminal?

Simple question for the group: Regarding PX_LAST, PX_VOLUME etc... What does the "PX" prefix stand for?
138 views

### Relating Quantitative Easing to the rally in the SPX

The Fed's balance sheet has been expanding over the last few month due to QE3. When the Fed goes out to buy treasuries or MBS, it's taking those securities out of the market and exchanging them with ...
250 views

### Matlab; How to specify Coupon frequency for Interest Rate Swap

I'm trying to price an interest rate swap and would like to change the default coupon payment frequency from 1 a year to 2 or 4 a year. I'm using ...
554 views

### Statistical models for exchange rates?

What stochastics processes (if any) are used to model currencies exchange rates and how good are such models ? References on subj. are also highly welcome.
1k views

I am currently doing my research for my master thesis, which will clearly focus on the question of risk managment in algorithmic trading systems. I have done research about this topic and found some ...
390 views

### LIBOR Rates available in CSV, XML etc

Is there a website that offers current LIBOR rates for all tenors for free in machine readable formats?
135 views

### Different Exercise Style Options on Same Underlying

Some equities on European markets have options traded in two different exercise styles: American and European. Examples: ABB and ABB (european) on Eurex Banco Santander on MEFF Consider ...
202 views

### Which prices to use to compute realized volatility?

For computation of realized volatility, especially range based volatility, deal prices are commonly used. If Level I data available should the deals data still be used or another measures of spot ...