# All Questions

125k views

### What data sources are available online?

What sources of financial and economic data are available online? Which ones are free or cheap? What has your experience been like with these data sources?
3k views

### How much data is needed to validate a short-horizon trading strategy?

Suppose one has an idea for a short-horizon trading strategy, which we will define as having an average holding period of under 1 week and a required latency between signal calculation and execution ...
70k views

### What programming languages are most commonly used in quantitative finance?

What programming languages are the most common in quantitative finance, and why are these languages used? Note: I do not mean, what languages are used to develop the accounting system at a hedge fund:...
8k views

### How to derive the implied probability distribution from B-S volatilities?

The general problem I have is visualization of the implied distribution of returns of a currency pair. I usually use QQplots for historical returns, so for example versus the normal distribution: ...
2k views

### How to estimate real-world probabilities

In the world of finance, Risk-neutral pricing allow us to estimate the fair value of derivatives using the risk free rate as the expected return of the underlyings. However, the behavior of ...
8k views

### Daily returns using adjusted close

I want to chart the daily returns of a stock, and I'm using Yahoo finance data to download historic data. I was told to use Adjusted Close, but there seems to be an issue with this. For ANTO.L, you ...
29k views

### How to compute Implied Volatility Calculation?

We all know if you back out of the BS option pricing model you can derive and solve what the options is "implying" as its volatility. However, what is the formula used to derive Implied Volatility (...
3k 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 ...
8k views

### What concepts are the most dangerous ones in quantitative finance work?

There are a few things that form the common canon of education in (quantitative) finance, yet everybody knows they are not exactly true, useful, well-behaved, or empirically supported. So here is the ...
3k views

### What are some good technical and non-technical books for a math lover to get in to quantitative analysis? [closed]

To get the ball rolling... I will answer this question this evening For people aware & unaware I think it would be a great way to introduce the group, resources for fundamental knowledge & ...
8k views

### What is the intuition behind cointegration?

What is the intuition behind cointegration? What does the Dickey-Fuller test do to test for it? Ideally, a non-technical explanation would be appreciated. Say you need to explain it to an investor ...
18k views

### How to calculate historical intraday volatility?

Sorry for what must be a beginner question, but when I went to write code I realized I didn't understand exactly how historical volatility, or statistical volatility, is defined. Wikipedia tells me "...
2k views

### How to generate a random price series with a specified range and correlation with an actual price?

I want to generate a mock price series. I want it to be within a certain range and have a defined correlation with the original price series. If I choose, say, oil, I want as many time series which ...
20k views

### Efficiently storing real-time intraday data in an application agnostic way

What would be the best approach to handle real-time intraday data storage? For personal research I've always imported from flat files only into memory (historical EOD), so I don't have much ...
19k views

### How should I store tick data?

How should I store tick data? For example, if I have an IB trading account, how should I download and store the tick data directly to my computer? Which software should I use?
15k views

### How are correlation and cointegration related?

In what ways (and under what circumstances) are correlation and cointegration related, if at all? One difference is that one usually thinks of correlation in terms of returns and cointegration in ...
47k views

I have a very basic data question: how to get a list of all common stocks traded on NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX? I would need to be able to get the approximate list of common stocks as is available in ...
23k views

### Why $N(d_1)$ and $N(d_2)$ are different in Black & Scholes
I'm struggling to understand the meaning of $d_1$ and $d_2$ in Black & Scholes formula and why they're different from each other. As per the formula, $$C = SN(d_1) - e^{-rT}XN(d_2)$$ which ...