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Cross Currency Swap Pricing in nowadays environment

Multicurve setting has now become the new paradigm for vanilla swap valuation. For the record I give here (without getting into too much details) the methodoloy for pricing Euribor3M swaps in this ...
9k views

Techniques to optimize the placement of orders in market making strategy?

Market making often requires placing and canceling a lot of orders. You have to buy and sell nearly simultaneously, so you need to move orders pretty often to beat other traders. But I would like to ...
852 views

What is the trickiest thing to get right in Rates Quant recently (2019)?

What are the biggest challenges for Rates Quants in 2019? Most quants have been through a lot over the past years-shifting their SABR models in JPY swaptions, fixing the FVA models for negative rates, ...
3k views

When do Finite Element method provide considerable advantage over Finite Differences for option pricing?

I'm looking for concrete examples where a Finite Element method (FEM) provides a considerable advantages (e.g. in convergence rate, accuracy, stability, etc.) over the Finite Difference method (FDM) ...
3k views

Which interest rate model for which product

Given the multitude of existing interest rate models (ranging from simple to very complex) it would be interesting to know when the additional complexity actually makes sense. The models I have in ...
1k views

Diversification, Rebalancing and Different Means

I have found many financial authors making generalizations about the geometric mean (GM) and arithmetic mean (AM) but they are wrong in certain circumstances. Could someone explain their reasoning? My ...
23k views

Is “eoddata” a good data source?

Not sure if this is a relevant question for site, but I am looking to move to www.eoddata.com as my data source. If anyone has used it, can you tell me how the data quality is ? I am currently ...
31k views

Is the Interactive Brokers API suitable for hft?

By HFT here I mean anything with holding period less than 5 to 10 minutes. Any empirical/anecdotal evidence of using it successfully on even higher frequencies?
17k views

Is Scala used in trading systems

I'm curious about high performance computing and consider algo/program trading as an interesting source of information about what are performant technologies that are used to trade the markets. Is ...
4k views

Why does the VIX index have *any* correlation to the market?

It appears that the log 'returns' of the VIX index have a (negative) correlation to the log 'returns' of e.g. the S&P 500 index. The r-squared is on the order of 0.7. I thought VIX was supposed to ...
6k views

Quantitative Math required for Market-making?

I understand there is an awful lot of Quantitative Math required for statistical arbitrage/algorithmic trading. However, would someone "in the know" be able to tell me whether there is less ...
8k views

I am starting to do Algorithmic trading in cryptocurrencies using Python libraries. Most exchanges have RESTful API that make it easy to write you own code and get started. However, I would like to ...
25k views

Why are GARCH models used to forecast volatility if residuals are often correlated?

The answers to this question on forecast assessment suggest that if the sequence of residuals from the forecast are not properly independent, then the model is missing something and further changes ...
3k views

Why are options trades supposed to be delta-neutral?

I'm reading Natenberg's book, and he says that all options trades should be delta neutral. I understand that this prevents small changes in the underlying price from changing the price of the option, ...
2k views

How can an ETF outperform its benchmark index?

Deutsche Bank’s ETF platform, db X-trackers, provides a rather remarkable ETF tracking Euro Stoxx 50 (which is the most widely used regional blue-chip index in Europe). What makes it remarkable is ...
2k views

How are distributions for tail risk measures estimated in practice?

Let's say you want to calculate a VaR for a portfolio of 1000 stocks. You're really only interested in the left tail, so do you use the whole set of returns to estimate mean, variance, skew, and shape ...
8k views

data on historical stock price of bankrupt companies

does anybody know a site where I can download historical data on stocks including companies that have gone bankrupt such as lehman brothers? it appears that bankrupt companies no longer appear in the ...
2k views

Does mean-variance portfolio optimization provide a real edge to those who use it?

Mean-variance optimization (MVO) is a 50+ year concept, and perhaps the first seminal idea of quantitative finance. Still, as far as I know, less than 25% of AUM in the US is quantitatively managed. ...
11k 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 ...
2k views

How to execute a large futures order?

I am currently trading futures products on some contracts that have low volumes. More accurately, the volumes of working orders in the book are fairly light. I am trying to execute a relatively large ...
2k views

Why isn't the Nelson-Siegel model arbitrage-free?

Assume $X_t$ is a multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, i.e. $$dX_t=\sigma dB_t-AX_tdt$$ and the spot interest rate evolves by the following equation: $$r_t=a+b\cdot X_t.$$ After solving for $X_t$ ...
950 views

How do macro funds manage risk and model asset returns? Do they use factor models?

Some of the largest funds in the world are entirely macro-based: Soros, Brevan Howard, Bridgewater. They trade across asset classes, and seemingly with very concentrated allocations. What type of risk ...
3k views

Portfolio optimization with monte carlo sampling from predictive distribution

Let's say we have a predictive distribution of expected returns for N assets. The distribution is not normal. We can interpret the dispersion in the distribution as reflection of our uncertainty (or ...
371 views

What are the effects of turning a backed currency into a fiat currency?

I hear a lot of debate over the removal of the U.S. Dollar's precious metal backing and the subsequent inflation rates, but is there any proven relationship between unbacked currency and extreme ...
26k views

How high of a Sharpe ratio is implausibly high for a low-frequency equity strategy?

I am looking to convince someone that an annualized Sharpe Ratio of 7 is 'extremely high' for a low frequency (daily rebalancing, say) long-short technical strategy on U.S. equities. I was hoping for ...
18k views

What is the “delta” option quoting convention about?

At my work I often see option prices or vols quoted against deltas rather than against strikes. For example for March 2013 Zinc options I might see 5 quotes available for deltas as follows: ...
2k views

What are reasons not to do factor investing in equity markets?

Factor investing in equity markets is one of the hot topics of these days. Many manufacturers of investment products offer exposure to small cap, momentum, minvol, value and other pure factors or ...
14k views

Portfolio optimisation with VaR or CVaR constraints using linear programming

I would like to optimize a portfolio allocation (maximizing the exposure or the expected return), but with VaR or CVaR contraints. (some parts of my portfolio cannot exceed a certain VaR) How can I ...
58k views

How to fit ARMA+GARCH Model In R?

I am currently working on ARMA+GARCH model using R. I am looking out for example which explain step by step explanation for fitting this model in R. I have time series which is stationary and I am ...
3k views

Did Citigroup really fail three times in the last 40 years?

I watched a speech by Simon Johnson at UCSB and, at one point, he claimed that Citigroup has failed three times since the 1980s. For example, he claims that Citigroup failed and was saved by the ...
8k views

Volatility pumping in practice

The fascinating thing about volatility pumping (or optimal growth portfolio, see e.g. here) is that here volatility is not the same as risk, rather it represents opportunity. Additionally it is a ...
5k views

Is there a popular curve fitting formula of options skew vs strike price or vs Delta?

I was trying to build a options trading/optimization system. But it often gets more inaccurate as it scans through the far from ATM options because, you know, options skews. That is because I did ...
14k views

What are the best Journals & Conferences in Quantitative Finance?

What are some of the most prominent journals, conferences and publishing venues in Quantitative Finance research? Where can I find information more information about them? (e.g. impact factor and ...
17k views

Discrete returns versus log returns of assets

There have been similar posts here already but nevertheless I find the question worth posting: why do some people claim that log returns of assets are more suitable for statistics than discrete ...
7k views

How do you evaluate a covariance forecast?

Suppose you have two sources of covariance forecasts on a fixed set of $n$ assets, method A and method B (you can think of them as black box forecasts, from two vendors, say), which are known to be ...
2k views

Statistical properties of stochastic processes for moving average trading to work

Common wisdom holds it that a moving average approach is more successful than buy-and-hold. There is quantitative evidence for that across different asset classes (see e.g. this book, or this paper ...
5k views

How do I compare implied and historic volatility?

what would you suggest are the starting points for comparing, in an easy, visual way, implied and delivered volatility surfaces? I'd like to see what the differences are between the historic surfaces, ...
3k views

Is there a standard method for getting a continuous time series from futures data?

I would like to be able to analyse futures prices as one continuous time series, so what kinds of methods exist for combining the prices for the various delivery dates into a single time series? I am ...
4k views

statistical arbitrage option overlay strategies / volatility trading

Here's an interesting trading puzzle that I would love to get the community's input on. Let's say there exists an alpha signal that does a good job of sorting equities expected excess returns over ...
975 views

Measuring Behavioral Finance Effects in Fund/Portfolio Manager Analysis

I want to know if there are some standardized measures to evaluate how irrationally human a portfolio manager is. Are there any performance measures or scorings for behavioral finance effects? How "...
13k views

Why does implied volatility show an inverse relation with strike price when examining option chains?

When looking at option chains, I often notice that the (broker calculated) implied volatility has an inverse relation to the strike price. This seems true both for calls and puts. As a current ...
11k views

Book on market microstructure

Can I get some recommendations for a book on market microstructure? I'm not looking for some author's questionable methods for trading, I'm just looking for a book that provides me with facts about ...
3k views

How random are financial data series?

Pseudorandom number generators are often tested using e.g. a test suite like Diehard tests or Dieharder. If one would run these tests e.g. on stock market time series or other financial data, would ...
9k views

The bid-ask bounce is the bouncing of trade prices between the bid and ask sides of the market. It introduces a systematic bias to the data which can cause serious problems in analysis. What methods ...
12k views

Why is GARCH(1,1) so popular, especially in academia?

What makes GARCH(1,1) so prevalent in modeling volatility, especially in academia? What does this model offer that makes it significantly better than the others?
5k views

Evaluating automated trading strategies: accepted practice

Both for private projects, and for clients, I've been working on code a lot this year to evaluate automated trading strategies. This often ends up turning into the task of how to fairly compare apples ...
11k views

Usage of Random forests in Quantitative analysis of stocks

I have a question about Random forests and how they could be utilized in trading? I heard Random forests are used for classification, is that accurate? If so, could someone give an example of what ...
2k views

Why is there no “meta-model”?

If I design a trading model, I might want to know the model's half life. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to predict alpha longevity without a meta-model of the market. Intuitively, such a meta-...