All Questions

171 views

Models for volatility estimation of high frequency data?

I have read on several news articles and research papers, "Contrary to popular belief, high frequency trading reduces volatility in stock markets rather than exacerbates it". Do you know the models ...
683 views

Correlation between S&P500 returns and 10y US Treasuries yields

I'd like to investigate the comovement of stock index returns with bond yields but I don't know which return's duration to use (1-year, 1-month or anything else) to get a better view of the ...
42 views

How to compute return of a variance swap?

How does one calculate the investment of a zero initial investment asset, specifically a variance swap? In this asset the payoff is given by the difference between the realized variance in a certain ...
492 views

QuantLib: Black / BSM processes and pricing via volatility surface. Different results?

I start this question with a couple of C++ functions that will be useful to show some results. So start your Visual Studio C++ Express or Ceemple or whatever you want and copy & paste this: ...
27 views

Real-World Cash Account Implementation and Return

Often in financial math, the concept of the risk-free cash account, with return R, is invoked as an instrument for calculating prices - when constructing an option-replicating portfolio, for example. ...
334 views

Are there providers of delayed market depth data (DOM, Level II, Order-by-Order, etc)?

I have market depth data visualization software, and I want to create a free version for introduction. As far as I know, exchanges allow to distribute their data for free for the end-users, but only ...
98 views

Recommended Literature for creating Factor Mimicking Portfolios

Is there a textbook that contains the basics for creating Factor Mimicking Portfolios? Although there is a lot of peer-reviewed literature on this, I cannot find textbooks on Asset Pricing that ...
195 views

law of one price, understanding

I am reading about mathematical finance, and I was tipsed to ask the quesiton on this site. It is about the "law of one price". Just first I'll make precise the model my book uses: I have a single ...
659 views

Strictly local martingales: what is the intuition behind them?

A process $X_t$ is a local martingale if for each increasing sequence of stopping times $\{\tau_k,k=1,2,...\}$ the stopped process is a martingale. All true martingales are local martingales, but the ...
145 views

Cross-sectional volatility vs temporal volatility

Volatility is usually defined as the standard deviation of returns, but sometimes it is calculated as the standard deviation of cross-sectional return divided by the square root of time, where other ...
116 views

How to de-seasonalize natural gas term structure data?

I need to de-seasonalize Nat Gas futures data for a project and am hoping to get good suggestions. As we all know natural gas futures are priced higher for the winter months and to analyze/model the ...
142 views

How low can HFT transaction costs go?

When evaluating an HFT strategy, transaction costs are clearly an important question. When looking at commercial discount brokers for retail clients, costs can be as low as 0.005 USD per share, but ...
252 views

Looking for Research Paper on Creation of Currency Baskets

I came across a paper, not sure it originated from academia or a blog or such, that reported on applying principal components to build currency baskets from a set of individual currency pairs and to ...
47 views

proper choice of risk aversion parameter in the risk-sensitive cost-criterion

Suppose I want to minimize certain risk sensitive cost. Is it a valid question to ask what is the proper (also in which sense) choice of risk aversion parameter in the risk-sensitive cost-criterion ? ...
74 views

What is the distribution of stock splits?

I want to know how rare are splits more extreme than, say, 7:1 (and reverse splits similarly). An answer here points to announcements on Yahoo Finance, but apparently only monthly views. What is a ...
178 views

Heat/Diffusion Equation

I am working on a problem where I have successfully reduced a version of Black Scholes to the Heat Equation and then shown the solution to be: ...
310 views

Why are we obsessed over normalizing financial data?

I have recently began work on some high frequency financial tick data. I have been told to 'normalize' the data as much as possible and run linear regressions through them. In fact, the data doesn't ...
416 views

I am trying to plot the asset swap spreads of government inflation-linked bonds (ILBs) versus the asset swap spread of government nominal (plain-vanilla) reference bonds. I used the article in the ...
72 views

Negative Risky vs Negative Butterfly

I understand that in regard to FX options, a volatility smile with negative Risk Reversals is effectively indicating that the spot market for a given currency pair is in decline (puts over). In ...
68 views

Underlying changes impact on implied volatility

What are some valid techniques that can be used to simulate how changes in the underlying are most likely to impact implied volatility along with the skew of all strikes for options with the same ...
142 views

Probability of Hyperinflation as a function of Probability of Soverign Default

I'm looking for some academic research on modeling risk of hyperinflation. Specifically, I'm interested in modeling the probability of hyperinflation over some time interval (e.g., probability of ...
42 views

Chaikin Money Flow Persistence Formula

I am trying to create an approximation of the Accumulation/Distribution Rating using the Chaikin Money Flow Persistance indicator. I have the Chaikin Money Flow Formula as below, could anyone assist ...
80 views

CVA number used by Finance Team

What are different reasons, Finance Team will need CVA number for? Is there any specific regulatory reporting to be done?
144 views

Non-Negativity of up-factor and down-factor in Binomial No-Arbitrage Pricing Model

Consider a stock which is trading at $S_0$ at time $t=0$ and is expected to be trading at price $uS_0$ or $dS_0$ at time t=1 where $u$ and $d$ are up-factor and down-factor. The theory says that to ...
189 views

288 views

How to find optimal look back in quant trading models

I'm in the process of building a quantitative trading model, I want to improve on the way in which I decide upon a look back length for the indicators. I understand the different pros/cons for very ...
214 views

Should I analyze the tick data day by day?

Let assume that we have one month of tick data which were traded at NYSE. We want to model the price changes as a function of the last p lags of price changes and the last q lags of the time duration ...
677 views

What happens when bond price is less than the recovery rate

I am simulating various price path of bonds, and one issue that came up is the recovery rate. When a bond defaults, the amount you get back recovery rate * principle. This creates a problem if the ...
269 views

where to find historical option prices?

I have a dataset of options (traded in European exchanges such as NYSE Euronext) and I would like to find their price history. Where to find it? I see that ...
266 views

Some clarifications on eigenvectors and eigenvalues from PCA

Could somebody tell me whether suggestions in bold true or not? Q # 1: http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/avellane/AvellanedaLeeStatArb071108.pdf ...
133 views

I know the "classical" modern portfolio theory. However I have quite a lot of different sources. It seems that there is not a book which cover this topic in a rigorous way: theory application ...
364 views

How to deal with extreme cases in normal random numbers generation?

In order to generate normal random numbers, one usually generates random numbers following a uniform distribution $Z \sim \mathcal{U}(0,1)$ and then applies the reverse CDF function on them ...
68 views

Opposite of Tail-Risk Hedge (Established Vocabulary)

I'm working on a client memo explaining several approaches to equity hedging, and I'm looking for a not-too-technical term for a hedging strategy where I try to keep options near the money, as to have ...
547 views

How to price a Swing Option?

I'm working in the commodity market and I've to price Swing Options with MATLAB, preferably with finite element. Has anyone already priced these kind of derivatives? I'm thinking about using the ...
402 views

How to get Geometric Brownian Motion's closed-form solution in Black-Scholes model?

The Black Scholes model assumes the following dynamics for the underlying, well known as the Geometric Brownian Motion: $$dS_t=S_t(\mu dt+\sigma dW_t)$$ Then the solution is given: ...
148 views

Comparison of multicurve calibration methods

It seems that there are mayor softwares around offering a multicurve framework based on bootstrap. I find this puzzling nowadays, given the distinct advantages of best-fit optimization methods and ...
4k views

Worked examples of applying Ito's lemma

In most textbooks Ito's lemma is derived (on different levels of technicality depending on the intended audience) and then only the classic examples of Geometric Brownian motion and the Black-Scholes ...
45 views

Questions related to the banking crisis during the European sovereign debt crisis

I am studying the European Sovereign Debt crisis and I have the following questions which I am struggling to find examples for: 1) I have heard that during the sovereign debt crisis, European ...
Quick Summary on Historic VaR Let $S_0,...,S_n$ be the daily values of some stock (where $S_0$ is the current value). Then for $i=1,\ldots,n$ we let \hat r_i:=S_{i-1}/S_i \quad \text{and}\quad \hat ...