# All Questions

3k views

### How to calibrate Hull-White from zero curve?

I am interested in calibrating a Hull-White model to the market. I do not, however, have data on anything except the market zero curves, as all derivatives are being traded OTC. My plan is to ...
495 views

### How do you estimate the volatility of a sample when points are irregularly spaced?

I was looking again at this question which basically haunts every quant I believe, and I was thinking about the effect of these gaps when computing volatility of the series. Let's define the problem ...
993 views

### What is the relationship between risk aversion and preference for skewness and kurtosis in portfolio optimization?

Is there any relationship between the risk aversion coefficient in an individual's utility function (commonly used in portfolio optimization) and the preference for higher moments such as skewness and ...
641 views

### Is Walk Forward Analysis a good method to estimate the edge of a trading system?

Do you think Walk Forward Analysis is a good method to estimate the predictability or edge of a trading system? Are there similar methods to know (estimate) how much alpha can capture an algo (in the ...
264 views

### Is a linear combination of GARCH processes also a GARCH process?

If two time series follow a GARCH process, and a third is a linear combination of them, is the third also GARCH process?
206 views

### Are there any valuation models of securities that use hyperbolic discounting?

To quote Wikipedia: In hyperbolic discounting, valuations fall very rapidly for small delay periods, but then fall slowly for longer delay periods. This contrasts with exponential discounting, in ...
459 views

### How would you test the hypothesis “There are no idiosyncratic returns available in the market”?

A commentary attributed to Matt Rothman had recently (in the past six months) been making the rounds of the internet echo chamber claimed "There are no idiosyncratic returns available in the market". ...
2k views

### Skewness and Kurtosis under aggregation

Returns possess non-zero skewness and excess kurtosis. If these assets are temporally aggregated both will disappear due to the law of large numbers. To be exact, if we assume IID returns skewness ...
644 views

### Which greeks do you need to hedge if you want to implement an implied-volatility security?

Assume you want to create a security which replicates the implied volatility of the market, that is when $\sigma$ goes up, the value of the security $X$. The method you could use is to buy call ...
728 views

### How to compute performance attribution between daily rebalanced strategies?

I have a daily rebalanced portfolio of several strategies. After one month, I now want to attribute the performance to the different strategies. There are several ways to do it. For instance one ...
598 views

### When is the LIBOR market model Markovian?

The question is inspired by a short passage on the LMM in Mark Joshi's book. The LMM cannot be truly Markovian in the underlying Brownian motions due to the presence of state-dependent drifts. ...
646 views

### One dimensional analog of cleansing a correlation matrix via random matrix theory

The general idea of cleansing a correlation matrix via random matrix theory is to compare its eigenvalues to that of a random one to see which parts of it are beyond normal randomness. These are then ...
376 views

### When is it rational to exercise a bond option early?

Consider american options on interest rate futures such as the 10-year treasury note. When is early exercise optimal?
546 views

### Is it possible to understand financial theory without mathematics?

I am trying to develop a short course on financial theory, covering the fundamentals of forward and options pricing, and 'efficient market' theory. I want to reduce the amount of mathematics to a ...
549 views

### VaR for portfolio of funds

Let's assume we need to calculate a 1-day VaR for a portfolio of funds. Funds are traded, they can be bought and sold every day. We know exactly what the assets in each fund are. What is the right way ...
665 views

### Links to the risk model methodologies of the major providers?

There is quite a bit of art in constructing an equity risk model. This paper summarizes some of the key decisions: choice of factors, horizon matching, cross-sectional vs. time-series method, and ...
506 views

### What to ask for in a good prototyping framework?

Reading up on quantitative methods, model development, and back-testing, one obvious question springs to mind: What should one ask of a prototyping (model testing) framework? I know a lot of people ...
2k views

### How to get list of all CUSIPS/ISIN?

I want a list of all CUSIPs/ISINs. It would be nice if they were also categorized (e.g. Bonds/Funds etc). Where can I get such a data?
2k views

### Easiest and most accessible derivation of Black-Scholes formula

I am preparing a QuantFinance lecture and I am looking for the easiest and most accessible derivation of the Black-Scholes formula (NB: the actual formula, not the differential equation). My favorite ...
4k views

### Earnings and valuation data sources online

Are there any free/cheap sources for historical data on company earnings and valuations? I can get historical price data from Google and Yahoo, and it looks like I can get about five years of ...
3k views

### How to calculate future distribution of price using volatility?

I want to create a lognormal distribution of future stock prices. Using a monte carlo simulation I came up with the standard deviation as being $\sqrt{(days/252)}$ $*volatility*mean*$ $\log(mean)$. ...
424 views

### copula-marginal algorithm

has there been any interesting work or advances on the copula-marginal algorithm (CMA) as proposed by Attilio Meucci. I am unable to find anything on the web other then the original article, here is ...
3k views

### How to estimate probability of default from bond prices?

How do you use bond prices/yields to infer probabilities of default? I would think of it as follows: Create a relationship between default free (e.g., Germany) and defaultable (e.g., Greece) bond ...
2k views

### Is the risk-free rate really limited by inflation?

In all the classic texts on equities derivatives, there is an assumption of the risk-free rate r. We can immediately dismiss the concept of a fixed rate; all interest rates are variable (and ...
925 views

### Forward Adjusting Stock Prices?

How should one correctly forward adjust historical prices given a time series of Open, High, Low, Close, Return? Suppose that the data series is given below ('1' is the oldest interval; '5' is the ...
350 views

### Appropriate measure of Volatility for economic returns from an asset?

I am doing research on uncertainty analysis and risk assessment for oil field development. For doing economic forecast and valuation I use Real Options theory, which is almost similar to theory used ...
1k views

### Implementing a Fast Fourier Transform for Option Pricing

So, I'm in need of some tips regarding a small project I'm doing. My goal is an implementation of a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm (FFT) which can be applied to the pricing of options. First ...
361 views

### local price return and volume relationship

I wanted to see how the stock price and volume relationship is locally. So I tried ranking both the daily return (at day t) and volume (at day t) base on a 30 day rolling window with historical daily ...
887 views

### What is the Sugihara Trading System?

I recently heard the term Sugihara Trading System. I guess it might be some trading strategy or a special model to predict trends in market data, but I couldn't find out anything about it. Does anyone ...
1k views

### Is QuantLib more trouble than it's worth?

I'm just starting to work with QuantLib and wonder if I'm going down a very wrong path. I'm working on a site that presents the visitor with a table of streamed real-time options data, including ...
177 views

### Breaking Transactions Down into Derivatives

We were talking about merger arb in a class I had last night, and when we got do deal construction it was mentioned that the different ways can be viewed as different options. For instance a fixed ...
333 views

### Why do people always seek finite-variance models for option pricing

For the purpose of getting fatter tails than the Guassian, I have seen people for example use $\alpha$-stable processes to model the stock. But in that case they end up using 'tempered' versions of ...
379 views

### What good papers of short term (<30 seconds) volatility estimation [duplicate]

I am looking for good papers of short term (<30 sec) volatility estimation AND short term volatility forecasting. Do you have something in mind ?
191 views

### St Petersburg lottery pricing & short investing horizons

I am a statistician (no solid background in finance). Please forward me to a book \ chapter \ paper to resolve the following general question. Suppose we have a stock with the following monthly return ...
4k views

### What is the best live options data API?

What is the best/cheapest service to get real-time (as real-time as you can get) on stock options? I'm looking for the fastest update on the ENTIRE market, with a few stocks prioritized, so I need ...
753 views

### How are Expected Shortfall and Variance related?

I would like to know how Expected Shortfall $SF_\alpha$ and variance $\sigma^2$ are related. If I follow what Aaron Brown answered in this post, when the underlying distribution is Normal with ...
319 views

### What drives changes in implied volatility on ETFs/ETNs?

I thought implied volatility, as well as the VIX, primarily increase due to increases in the underlying asset's volatility, as well as the options themselves being bid up because more people were ...