# All Questions

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What does this mean: "Front-end vols have been trading lognormally while longer tails have traded normally." I read this in a research report, in the context of ...
43 views

### How do derivatives affect capital structures?

Yesterday, I was at a lecture where the speaker said that the impact of derivatives was often to make senior debt, in effect, subordinated debt (in terms of priority, recovery rates, etc.)? How do ...
114 views

### How does US banks ensure that other country's banks aren't counterfeiting USD?

I have had this question for a long time. For example, if I wire 50M USD from China to the US, does the Chinese bank physically deliver 50M USD cash to the US bank? or is it just changing a number in ...
657 views

### Beta of FTSE100 stocks against benchmark index FTSE100

first post so if I write something silly don't hold it against me. I calculated beta for almost all the stocks that compose the FTSE100. All have beta < 1. This, as far as I understand it, means ...
690 views

### Deriving Interest Rates

I am trying to teach myself about interest rate swaps, how they are priced, etc... Easy enough - just comparing cash flows of fixed and floating rate bonds. However, what I'm struggling with is how ...
123 views

### Is the purchase of a stock publicly accessible?

If an investor bought a stock, could another private party access that information anywhere? Does the SEC/exchange itself create a real time/ historical record of who holds what stocks, and is that ...
382 views

### Platform for Quantitative equity portfolio

What are the most popular platforms used for quantitative equity portfolio management/research? I've only used Barra so far for their factor models. Is there any specific feature or model you think ...
98 views

### What does 2 Year Annualized mean compared to 1 Year Annualized

I am looking at a company's financial report and there is a table in it that lists returns over different annualized periods. It ranges from 1 year to 20 years. Would a 2 year return in this table be ...
404 views

### Electricity market : how to design an optimal hedging strategy using spot and futures markets for an industrial consumer?

Here is the problem : we should adopt the point of view of an industrial company which purchases electricity as an input in its production line and which wants to achieve the following two goals : ...
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### regarding Basel II III model

I may have to get involved in some projects using Basel II, III model for risk modeling, to which I have no background. Are there any good book/tutorials to recommend? What are the underlying ...
191 views

### Market-Maker existence impact to short-term informed directional trading

How existence of market-maker affects short-term directional trading? Normally when playing short-term directional we play against market marker that will cover losses from uninformed traders. But ...
198 views

### What is the correct / expected behavior for a market order sent to an empty book?

Should it stick around until liquidity shows up? (GTC) Should it cancel any size for which there is no liquidity? (IOC) Is there such a thing as Market GTC or Market Orders must always be IOC?
110 views

### Variable Selection with Kalman Filter

I'm trying to estimate factor loadings on portfolios over time for portfolios that are traded pretty frequently. I have a sense that several portfolios are loading on the Fama-French HML factor ...
798 views

### Why parameterize the Black Scholes implied volatility surface?

I know that SVI volatility surfaces are very popular among financial practitioners. I understand that this is not really a model for some underlying asset (such as Black Scholes, Heston etc.) but ...
573 views

### How to use the stock as a numeraire to price a derivative with payoff of the form $(S_T f(S_T))^+$?

I have $\frac{dS_t}{S_t} = rdt + \sigma dW_t$ as usual under the money-market numéraire and I need to price options with payoffs $$(S_T f(S_T))^+$$ How do I express the stock dynamics using the ...
276 views

### Quant teams predicting the World Cup

It is a good tradition of the quant teams of the major banks to predict the World Cup. As an example see this new paper from Goldman Sachs: The World Cup and Economics 2014 (Brazil will win by the ...
214 views

### Girsanov theorem in CMS convexity derivation

I am going through the derivation of CMS convexity from the notes of Lesniewski There is a transformation from $T_p$ forward measure to annuity measure $Q$ as  ...
1k views

### Why shrink the covariance matrix?

I'm trying to understand why it's useful to shrink the covariance matrix for portfolio construction or in fact general. Think I missing something. I know if you have 5,000 stocks it's a lot of ...
5k views

### Why is the VIX futures market usually in a state of contango?

I'm a VIX newbie and I'm trying to understand why the VIX futures market is usually in a state of contango. All I can figure is that the sellers of VIX futures contracts demand high "prices" (because ...
132 views

### Do people hedge with leveraged ETFs intraday? How?

Seems that the answer to the first part should be yes, but haven't seen any references or examples. E.g. suppose I want to hedge XLF position with FAZ. Do people use close to current returns, or just ...
559 views

### Price change of a bond towards yield and YTM

I have been trying to get a good picture of PV01 and DV01(PVBP). I was going through below link. This measure is the absolute value of the change in price of a bond for a one basis point change in ...
187 views

### Obtaining Expense Ratio Data

I have a list of tickers (~11,500) in a .txt/.csv file and accompanying fund data from yahoo finance. I'm wondering if there is a reasonably easy/accessible way to use this list to obtain expense ...
119 views

### Standard Deviation as listed in Rebonato's Volatility and Correlation: Binomial Replication 2.3.4 Worked-Out Example

I am reading Rebonato's Volatility and Correlation (2nd Edition) and I think it's a great book. I'm having difficulty trying to derive a formula he used that he described as the expression for ...
313 views

Let's say we have a stock which our only actions are buy, sell and hold (with or without shorting). If we have sufficient past data of the stock, how can you determine the optimal trading action ...