# Tag Info

29

This one is quite easy: Think of a man walking his dog. He will go along and his dog will stroll along running back and forth. Man and dog are mathematically "cointegrated". As an investor you bet that the dog is coming back to his master or that the leash has only a certain length.

21

The standard story (also told by @vonjd) is of "The Drunk and Her Dog". This is based on "A Drunk and Her Dog: An Illustration of Cointegration and Error Correction" (1994). The story is itself based on the standard illustration for a random walk known as the "drunkard's walk". The Dickey-Fuller test is used to check for a unit root. It can be used as ...

12

Two time series $X_1$ and $X_2$ are cointegrated if a linear combination $aX_1+bX_2$ is stationary i.e. it has constant mean, standard deviation and autocorrelation function for some $a$ and $b$. In other words, the two series never stray very far from one another. Cointegration might provide a more robust measure of the linkage between two financial ...

8

The somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog post http://www.portfolioprobe.com/2010/10/18/american-tv-does-cointegration/ includes the example of two classes of shares on the same company. In this case you have two assets that are essentially the same but with a few details different. The buying and selling of these assets will make the prices fluctuate from each ...

7

You should look at Paul Willmott's Frequently Asked Questions In Quantitative Finance. He offers 12 (I think) ways of deriving BS and I think you'll find what you look for there. The cool thing is that you really have many different approaches; one is the classic PDE, one is done using change of measure, one is done using binary trees, and so on.... Really ...

3

I have asked myself the very same question when I first read the book. As far as I can tell, the "scalability" condition is only imposed for technical reasons. It simplifies the subsequent proof of the Fundemental Theorem of Asset Pricing in constrained markets. There are several papers that have shown that the theorem is valid for conic constraints. ...

1

Let $u_t$ be the random walk $$u_t = u_{t-i} + \varepsilon_t$$ where $\mathrm{E}[\varepsilon_t]=0$ and $\mathrm{var}[\varepsilon_t]=\sigma^2$ , i.e. $\varepsilon_t$ is stationary. Now let $$X_t = \alpha u_t +\nu_t$$ and $$Y_t = \beta u_t + \eta_t$$ where $\nu_t$ and $\eta_t$ are stationary processes similar to $\varepsilon_t$ Then both $X_t$ and ...

1

Here is an empirical strategy to test for cointegration. FIRST, check whether both $X_t$ and $Y_t$ contain an unit root. If they are both stationary then model $Y_t$ or $X_t$ in levels (and nothing is wrong). If one of the two is $I(1)$ (non-stationary for one level), then take differences to ensure stationarity. If they are both non-stationary, and hence ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible