# All Questions

106 views

### if market is always assumed right, what happened when LIBOR was manupulated?

Recently Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) raps banks in rate-rigging. This is nothing new, LIBOR was also manupulated before, by some "major" banks. however, before the censorship, did any ...
147 views

### Dual curves and short rate calibration

When I calibrate a short rate model to market swaption vols, what curve am I getting when I plug in the calibrated parameters into the analytical formulae (assuming they exist for the model I'm ...
175 views

### How to statistically compare the pricing errors of various option pricing models?

I have three different option pricing models, for which I computed the in-sample and out-of-sample pricing errors. Now I want to test the pricing performance of these three option pricing models ...
54 views

### Does YTM represent interest? [closed]

Does a bond's Yield to Maturity represent the amount of interest one gets at maturity even though it's expressed as a percentage? I read that it is a rate of return on a bond at maturity, but what is ...
2k views

### Difference between google finance and yahoo finance?

I am wondering about the huge differences of the data provider google finance and yahoo finance. I am interested in the monthly data from adidas listed on xetra. In google: ETR:ADS and in yahoo ...
1k views

### How to estimate real-world probabilities

In the world of finance, Risk-neutral pricing allow us to estimate the fair value of derivatives using the risk free rate as the expected return of the underlyings. However, the behavior of ...
649 views

### Applicability of PCA to get historical volatilities to calibrate interest rates trees

My question in short is as follows: can I take main principal component of historical covariance matrix and use it as historical volatilities when fitting a binomial tree? Here's more detailed ...
929 views

### Models for simulating FX movements

My goal is to develop a model to simulate long term FX movements. (I am not sure if long term makes any difference, but if it does I am more interested in long term fx movements) These Monte Carlo ...
366 views

### Is creating constrained random portfolios a hard problem?

Creating random portfolios with weights $x_i$ can be thought of as sampling from the surface of a simplex given by $$Ex = f$$ and $$Ax \le b$$ Where $E$ and $A$ are constraint matrices for equality ...
380 views

### Is there a name for, or any research on, a system where you try to predict future price by finding a similar price history in the past?

Allow me to explain. You look back from some period to the present. Say a week ago to now, using a per-minute view. You then crawl through your database of past price data, and you try to find a ...
118 views

### Approximating a function with trignometric polynomials

Let’s say I have a function, which is a time series of data points, I am trying to find a polynomial of fixed sine's and cosines that bests approximate the data points. I know Chebyshev Approximation ...
68 views

### % Return on backtest with variable positions and notional amounts

I have a 14 year backtest for a systematic strategy that uses a static notional per each position. On any given day I could have multiple positions long and short and notional long and short. How do ...
830 views

### How to calculate the conditional variance of a time series?

I am reading a paper where the term conditional variance is mentioned, but I am not really sure what is meant by this and how this can be calculated: Fig. 2 shows the conditional variances of the ...
3k views

### Why Drifts are not in the Black Scholes Formula

This question has puzzled me for a while. We all know geometric brownian motions have drifts $\mu$: $dS / S = \mu dt + \sigma dW$ and different stocks have different drifts of $\mu$. Why would ...
321 views

### Heston - How important are the initial guess in calibration and if it is very important, what would be a good way to get initial guess?

So I have been trying to implement a simple Heston calibration using crude MC with 10k scenarios and 1000 time steps and the best I could get is 3x of the observed implied volatility. I suspect it ...
332 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 ...
135 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 ...
554 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 ...
332 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 ...
3k 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, ...
464 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. ...
316 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 ...
159 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 ...
261 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 ...
169 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 ...
540 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 ...
311 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 ...
232 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 ...
250 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 ...
522 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 ...
71 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 ...
177 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 ...
224 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 ...
164 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 ...
815 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 ...
117 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 ...
292 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 ...
71 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 ...