All Questions

716 views

Indicators and research for stress-based investment strategies

In reference to this paper: Can risk aversion indicators anticipate ﬁnancial crises? and the investable UBS Risk Adjusted Dynamic Alpha Strategy: ...
3k views

How can I estimate the degrees of freedom for a Student's T distribution?

I am doing research estimating the value at risk for non-normally distributed assets. I need help in the process of estimating the parameters of Student's t distribution and which method to use. I ...
790 views

What exactly is the annualized forward premium?

A forward contract has a premium of $0$ because it is an obligation to buy or sell something in the future (hence there is more risk). Call and put options, on the other hand, have premiums of $C$ ...
2k views

What functional form describes the implied volatility curve?

It is often convenient to parametrize the implied volatility curve to allow easy interpolation of volatility for any strike or maturity. What functional form describes the implied volatility curve for ...
146 views

Could the Implied Volatility distribution change again? [closed]

It is well documented that following the stock market crash in 1987 the prices of options started to demonstrate skew and smile in the distribution of implied volatilities. This feature has been ...
208 views

5k views

Free paper trading site with an API

I've got a quanitative trading model I want to test out in the real stock market. Right now, I'm writing some code to pull "live" quotes from yahoo, feed them to my model, and keep track of the ...
784 views

Market Data For Project

I'm looking to find a service that will allow me to download historical data on stocks, bonds, options, futures, indices, etc and also to pick up new files either on a daily or weekly basis. I've been ...
327 views

Obtaining characteristics of stochastic model solution

I want to use the following stochastic model $$\frac{\mathrm{d}S_{t}}{ S_{t}} = k(\theta - \ln S_{t}) \mathrm{d}t + \sigma\mathrm{d}W_{t}\quad (1)$$ using the change in variable $Z_t=ln(S_t)$ we ...
217 views

Reference material about Quantified Asset Allocation?

I am looking for papers that would describe asset allocation with geometry, group theory, markov chains or things like that. Keeping asset allocation in a range is easy but to keep it more precisely ...
1k views

Please Explain the Debt to China [closed]

Can someone please explain to me how we are in debt with China? Every weblog, article, journal I read have people in the comments going insane about how we "owe China monies" and "China owns the US" ...
4k views

Annualzing the log of daily returns riddle

Two popular ways to measure returns are Arithmetic returns and Log returns. Let's define arithmetic (simple period) returns as: P(t) - P(t-1) / P(t-1). Let's define log return as Ln( P(t)/P(t-1) ) or ...
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 ...
2k views

Market Value of a CDS

I need to model the market value of CDS in a portfolio. My current approach is to calculate the present value of the future spread payments - does anybody have a better idea to solve the problem? ...
716 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 ...
1k views

Which data service to buy for redistributable data?

This is a follow-up to my previous question regarding anyone whom wanted to 'donate' data. So far no one has stepped up (learning more about buying and selling data, I realize that I'm going to have ...
156 views

Where can I find the standard discount curves for the standard CDS model?

Where can I find the standard discount curves for the standard CDS model? In particular I'm keen to see if ZAR is a supported currency yet...
525 views

QuantLib and exact numerical simulation

I've just downloaded quantlib and started playing around with it, and it looks like it's designed primarily to use Euler discretizations for everything -- so far as I can tell, there's not even a ...