Tag Info

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...