# All Questions

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### What is a Quant

In the interest of having "canonical questions" on this site ... What is a Quant?
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### Why is the first principal component a proxy for the market portfolio, and what other proxies exist?

Let's say that I have a universe of stocks from a certain sector. I want to compute the market portfolio of this sector. Beta is the covariance between each stock and the market. But how do you ...
11k views

### Why would an investor trade a variance swap over a volatility swap?

Why would an investor trade a variance swap over a volatility swap? Is it simply related to the leverage involved in a Var (i.e. sigma-squared) or is there something else to it?
764 views

### What are the risk factors in analysing strategies?

What do you think of strategies displayed on timelyportfolio.blogspot.com? I really like the fact that there is some code to reproduce the strategies, but they seem very elementary because he does ...
20k views

### Calculating log returns using R

I am trying to calculate the log returns of a dataset in R using the usual log differencing method. However, the calculated data is simply a vector of zeroes. I can't see what I'm doing wrong. Here ...
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### Are e-mini markets manipulated?

Are the prices of e-minis such as S&P 500, Russell 2000, EUROSTOXX, etc. manipulated? That is, are there traders who trade large enough positions to make the price go in the direction they want, ...
2k views

### How to solve for the implied stock lending rate given equity options prices?

When market makers price options on hard-to-borrow equities, they include the cost to borrow the underlying equity that their broker is going to charge them to sell the security short to hedge. I'm ...
3k views

### How can I learn about the quantitative aspects of market making in illiquid single stock options?

I would like to learn more about the possible ways of doing quantitative research regarding option market making. In particular, while the mainstream index option market may be very liquid, the ...
4k views

Using total return calculations is critical in developing security selection models. The standard way to measure total return is to develop a series of price-adjusted data. Investopedia describes the ...
7k views

### Rationale for OIS discounting for collateralized derivatives?

Can someone explain to me the rationale for why the market may be moving towards OIS discounting for fully collateralized derivatives?
788 views

### Reference request: Survey article on GPU in Finance

I would like to get and idea of how people use GPUs in finance. I can find some specific papers or books on the subject. GPUs in binomial model, finite difference, monte carlo,... But I couldn't ...
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### Is it ever possible that---because of illiquidity---exercising an out-of-the-money option is better than directly buying the stock?

Is there a case, where due to illiquidity, exercising out-of-the-money options could be better than directly buying the stock? When a stock is too illiquid, there are some costs because of this ...
227 views

### Why are futures valueless?

I understand that futures exchanges are set up in such a way that traders don't pay cash in order to assume a long position on a futures contract; they simply "enter into" the contract, essentially ...
810 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 ...
3k views

### Equity Risk Model Using PCA

I'm trying to build a simple risk model for stocks using PCA. I've noticed that when my dimensions are larger than the number of observations (for example 1000 stocks but only 250 days of returns), ...
1k views

### How to conduct Monte Carlo simulations to test validity of Black Scholes for a specific option?

In reference to the original Black Scholes model, what approach is best to test the model in a rigorous way? Is there a standard approach that can accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time? ...
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### 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". ...
7k views

### Discrete returns versus log returns of assets

There have been similar posts here already but nevertheless I find the question worth posting: why do some people claim that log returns of assets are more suitable for statistics than discrete ...
667 views

### If stock A has a 60% chance of rising, and stocks A and B have 80% correlation, what is the chance of stock B rising?

As in the subject, I'm interested in a math puzzle of sorts: If stock A has a 60% chance of rising, and stocks A and B have an 80% correlation, what is the chance of stock B rising? Would it be ...
3k views

### What is an effective way of backtesting VWAP execution?

From Optimal Trading Strategies : There are two main reasons why traders execute orders using a VWAP trading strategy. First, a VWAP strategy is the trading strategy that minimizes market ...
6k views

### What are the main limitations of Black Scholes?

Pls explain and discuss these limitations, and explain which models can I use to overcome these limitations. Alternatively, provide examples of how to modify the original Black Scholes to overcome ...
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### Portfolio construction in reality?

There are various models for portfolio selection in literature, like, Harry Markowitz (HM) model ( Mean-Variance Model) [well known model] Konno and Yamazaki (1991) model: minimizes the sum of ...
365 views

### Is there a website that lists replication code of financial papers?

There are lot of questions on this website related to the replication of the empirical part of financial papers. I noticed that some (honest) authors provide on their personal website some ...
7k 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 ...
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### What is the expected return I should use for the momentum strategy in MV optimization framework?

As all research on the momentum strategies are focused on the indicator, i.e. the entry point, there seems not much discussion on its expected return? Though there are some discussions on the exit ...
4k 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 $\sqrt{(days/252)}$ $*volatility*mean*$ $\log(mean)$. ...
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### Why do Human traders make money?

Over the years I met a couple of dozen of (human) traders who I'd consider good (being in the business for several years, generating a reasonably steady income). I had chances to chat with some of ...
367 views

### How to account for market movement when some exchanges are closed?

Daily data, such as open and close prices, is often available for much longer periods than high-frequency data. However, whenever backtesting any strategy that examines instruments traded in different ...
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### How to compute modified-CVaR in the PerformanceAnalytics package?

My objective is to measure the modified-CVAR for a portfolio given its weights and matrix of security returns. Luckily the wonderful package PerformanceAnalytics has an ES() function that does just ...
6k 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 ...
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### How to “uncluster” a set of financial data?

I am attempting to evaluate and compare the profit factor of different "test runs" of a FOREX trading strategy. My problem is that, despite an average time between orders of 2hr+, some of these runs ...
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 ...
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### Intuitive explanation of the Hansen-Jagannathan bound

The Hansen-Jagannathan bound states that the maximum Sharpe ratio of a portfolio can't exceed the ratio of the standard deviation of a stochastic discount factor to its mean. I more or less understand ...
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### What are some examples of Compound Poisson processes in insurance?

I'm writing the Bachelor thesis but I need some information. I need to find some practical examples and applications of the Compound Poisson Process in insurance. Does anyone have any good examples?