# All Questions

183 views

### Estimate the market maker's price from the posted Bid/Ask and Trade price

If I see a Bid at 181.77 and and Ask at 181.78 for SPY and then immediately see a trade filled at 181.77 on BATS, then what can we conclude about market making activity? i.e At what price did the ...
193 views

### Volatility calculation for intra-day cash-or-nothing call binary option

Firstly, I do not have a quant finance background. This is new to me, and I imagine that this is a basic question for this group. I am calculating the price of a binary/digital option with ...
80 views

### Is it illegal for a publicly traded company to publish inaccurate financial data?

If you are the book keeper for a publicly traded company and you misrepresent the financial earnings of the company (even if by accident) for an earnings quarter, is this illegal?
131 views

### probablity expiring in the money ..basic question

Everyone says $N(d_2)$ is the probability of the option being exercised but stocks that have really high volatility have really expensive options indicating a high likelihood of expiring in the money. ...
177 views

### How does Vega of a call/put behave under the Black-Scholes model?

I have two questions. I would prefer a reference if possible. Is the value of vega bounded for $\sigma\in [0,\infty)$? (I assume so, I imagine it goes to 0 as $\sigma$ go to infinity.) Are there any ...
509 views

### fair price for a call option

I am struggling with the following problem: An investor is considering a European call option, whose price $C_0$ is yet to be determined, on the shares of a company called XYZ. You know that : the ...
205 views

### Downside deviation

have any practitioners here worked with the downside deviation metric? I've looked a little into its concepts but wish to know its utility in practice (if any). Does it bring any value to risk ...
896 views

### Free database for storing intraday tick data and querying bar (candle) data on budget hardware

I'm using a cloud machine with 512 RAM to store tick data in mysql, but I'm having trouble querying candle data. My current solution is to select all data within a time interval and do the tick -> ...
156 views

### what is considered material information? [closed]

I'm trying to understand what is considered "material" information held by an executive of a company. There is company information that an executive (say insider) will know that a public investor will ...
221 views

### Lattice Boltzmann method for pricing options

I'm looking into whether there is ANY information out there regarding the implementation of the Lattice Boltzmann method for pricing options (or other financial tasks). I am very new to the world of ...
102 views

### Inferring signals in absence of sign of principal components (PCA)?

PCA seems to be very popular in dimension reduction applications and for extracting the top PCs which explain the data. One such application in futures is on the term structure to obtain the level, ...
187 views

### Penny jumping in the direction of the price

Reading through examples of legal front running, I'm struggling to understand how "penny jumping" (http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Front-running) can be profitable. Suppose stock ABC is trading at a ...
435 views

### MonteCarlo simulation of stock prices using milstein scheme with dividend yield?

While performing a montecarlo simulation of stock prices using the milstein scheme is it possible to take into account the dividend yield into the simulation itself somehow, if we are given a ...
737 views

### Lagged dependent variable, yes or no?

I read conflicting opinions about the inclusion of lagged dependent variables in modeling, and I guess it is partly up to the researcher and depending on the scope and goal of the research. I'm ...
538 views

### Arbirtage free price process question in Bjork's Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time

I am currently working through questions in Bjork's Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time. However, I am unable to solve the following question, 7.2 in the book. A solution would be greatly appreciated. ...
102 views

### Compare fund managers with insignificant alphas?

For my thesis I am evaluating two mutual fund portfolios in order to check for differences in manager performance. My hypothesis is that there will be no differences in performance (in terms of alpha) ...
80 views

### ISDA: Interpreting a date specified as x business days prior to another date with a business day convention of 'NONE'

I've got an interest rate swap, it has a right-to-break with a bermudan exercise schedule. For each exercise, the settlement date is specified as an already-adjusted business day. The "last ...
236 views

### How can I calculate the margin requirements for a Bitcoin futures contract?

Suppose that I want to calculate what the margin requirements should be for a Bitcoin futures contract, where the contract is the USD/BTC exchange rate (settled in Bitcoins). I've looked at the SPAN ...
44 views

### What does “primary calendar” mean?

I was reading the 2013 research rankings article on Institutional Investor and came across the following quote: "We do not expect spread widening in most markets, and we expect the primary calendar to ...
190 views

### What does it mean by “labor taxes cut is self-financed”?

I'm reading "Principle of Economics" by Mankiw. In Part III Market and Welfare, Ch 8 "Application: the costs of taxation", it says: Only 32% of a cut in U.S. labor taxes would be self-financed, the ...
72 views

### Problems to understand a stochastic DGL equality

currently I am reading a paper called "Portfolio optimisation under non-linear drawdown constraints in a semimartingale financial model" for self-study reasons. The paper can be found here: ...
340 views

### Black 76 for Options on Interest Rate Futures

This is my first time using Black76 to value options on IR futures and I have a question on $F$ and $K$. I understand the price for an IR future is usually quoted as $100 - r$. Do I use this price ...
553 views

### Components of an index in a specific date

Objective: Get a list of all the companies that were ever part of an index (e.g.: FTSE100) in a given period of time (scale: years/decades). Method I have in mind: 1) Create an empty list k. 2) Get ...
115 views

### Analysing FX Data

When analysing currencies, the data always comes in pairs so it is hard to normalise a multivariate time series of data e.g. if I have GBPvsUSD, EURvsUSD and CADvsUSD then changes in the US economy ...
349 views

### Risks of issuing an Autocallable Note

Let's say that I'm issuing an Autocallable Note with the following features: Underlying: FTSE 100 Autocall Observation Frequency: Annual Observation Autocall Level: 100% of Initial Level of FTSE ...
4k views

### C# Broker API for FX Trading

I am looking for a broker who provides a free trading API for FX. The goal is to develop at-home algorithms in C# (possibly Qt) to run on a fake portfolio, and then later on real money with ...
153 views

### Greeks of self-financing portfolio

I would like to learn more about the Greeks of portfolios of options: In textbooks and websites, I commonly encounter the unqualified claim that "The Greek measure of a portfolio is the sum of the ...
192 views

### stock option strategies long vs short

What makes an option strategy long or short? I got the impression that if it is a net debit (you pay to open the strategy) it is classified 'long' (strangle, straddle) Then I learned about the call ...
774 views

### Breakeven of a delta-hedged option

Basic question to which I surprisingly did not find an answer on here. What's the best approximation to the break-even (with respect to stock price) for an option that was hedged fully at point of ...
85 views

### Can you hedge a derivative with a CASH|spot product or does it have to be another derivative instrument

Consider you have a SWAP (any kind) to hedge this SWAP, you will most likely use another Derivative,but can you use a cash|spot product to hedge this. Like Cash Equity or FX Spot
321 views

### Risk Neutral Evaluation - Exchange/Spread Options

I have two assets, $S_1$ and $S_2$, which follow geometric Brownian motion processes. This implies that both $S_1$ and $S_2$ have a lognormal distribution. I'm trying to get the exchange option price ...
193 views

### reinsurance pricing equivalent to option pricing

Is it true that pricing a reinsurance contact is equivalent to pricing an option. Basically a reinsurance just cuts off the risk exposure of the insured institution to a threshold say $K$. So if we ...
369 views

### Bond futures - calendar spread pricing

I am looking on literature and models on pricing a bond futures' calendar spread. assuming the basket of deliverable bonds is the same and the ctd is the same, what are the factores determining the ...
275 views

### Electricity volatility smile

In the electricity sector, what should be the shape of the volatility smile? a behavior similar to other commodities with a convex curve, decreasing first and then growing to the initial level. or ...
254 views

### Why are indifference equations in mean-variance portfolio theory convex shaped

As the title suggests why is the indifference equations in mean variance portfolio theory convex shaped? Indifference Equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indifference_curve A graph:
1k views

### IMM dates in excel

I need to get the IMM dates in excel. IMM dates are defined as the third Wednesday of every March/June/September/December.
115 views

### right benchmark for an incompletely diversified international portfolio (for a CAPM): MSCI World or MSCI ACWI IMI?

I want to calculate annual excess returns on portfolios using monthly returns for a CAPM (for the assets in the portfolio as well as for the benchmark), in order to have more information on the ...
2k views

### how to chain monthly excess returns into annual?

I want to calculate annual excess returns on portfolios using monthly returns for a CAPM (for the assets in the portfolio as well as for the benchmark), in order to have more information on the ...
458 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 ...
274 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 ...
413 views

### When calculating CIP between EU and US, which interest rates data to use?

I am wondering which data to use to test the Covered Interest Rate Parity between Europe and the United States. Recap that for the CIP to hold, it should mean that F/S = (1+r)/(1+r*) where F = the ...
406 views

### Proxy for Expected Economic Growth

Can anyone help me understand how expected economic growth is usually measured? I've read several papers that talk about using breakeven inflation as a proxy for expected inflation, and then the ...
407 views

### BSYM for historical tickers

When looking through Bloomberg's BSYM data ADR and Common Stock data (5/2/13), I was able to find the ticker symbol 'V' associated with Visa but was unable to find any record for Vivendi, which I ...
133 views

### How does one use the Johansen cointegration test in a linear time series model?

How does one use the Johansen cointegration test in a linear time series model? Should I only use normalized coeffients for interpretation? Or, once I know that the variables are cointegrated, do I ...
687 views

### How is the MESA sine wave calculated?

I've found many, many sites which describe what the MESA sine wave looks like and how to interpret it. But I have yet to find any site that describes the actual formula used to calculate the sine ...
174 views

### monthly contract volume required for penny increments?

Have the exchanges disclosed their criteria? Does anyone have a best guess based upon observations of volume (however you wish to define it)? Please no qualitative answers.
67 views

### Annual Percentage Rate and Yield

I found references relative to US where the Nominal Annual Percentage Rate or simply APR is defined as the simple interest rate (i.e. proportional to time and without compounding). Instead the ...
70 views

### How to model housing loan market?

Housing loan market vibrates according to the policies, such as LTV rate, for example, if must pay 20% downpayment, LTV rate would be 80% interest rate, for example, lifting the loan rate, the ...
I am trying to understand how factor loadings in a general factor model are computed. For simplicity sake, lets assume a simple model: $$R = B \times F + \epsilon$$ $$R = N \times 1$$  B = N ...