# All Questions

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7k views

### The application of quantitative finance in sports betting

I notice that, on the surface, there are some similarities between quantitative sports betting and quantitative finance. Both have the concept of arbitraging, etc. What are the applications of ...
12k views

### What is a “coherent” risk measure?

What is a coherent risk measure, and why do we care? Can you give a simple example of a coherent risk measure as opposed to a non-coherent one, and the problems that a coherent measure addresses in ...
14k views

### 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 ...
979 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 ...
390 views

### Is there a relationship between Risk Neutral Pricing framework and Nash Equilibria?

Based on the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing, the risk neutral price of a contingent claim on an asset in a liquid, arbitrage free market can be determined by switching to an equivalent $Q-$ ...
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 ...
5k 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 ...
9k views

### Which Algorithmic trading library would you recommend for trading Bitcoin?

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

### 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 ...
4k 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, ...
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

### 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 ...
18k 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 ...
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. ...
15k 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 ...
12k 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 $X_t$ ...
6k 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, ...
954 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 ...
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 ...
381 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 ...
27k 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 ...
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-...
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 ...
9k views

### Why dynamics of local volatility is wrong?

In Dupire's local volatility model, the volatility is is a deterministic function of the underlying price and time, chosen to match observed European option prices. To be more specific, given a ...
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 ...
60k 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 ...
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 ...
7k views

### Regime-Switching Model for detecting market shifts

I'm always wondering whether anyone has utilized regime-switching models successfully in forecasting or trading. Academia has long discussed this topic in-depth, such as using Regime Switching ...
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 ...
4k views

### When should you build your own equity risk model?

Commercial risk models (e.g., Barra, Axioma, Barclays, Northfield) have evolved to a very high level of sophistication. However, all of these models attempt to solve a very broad set of problems. ...
13k views

### Is statistical arbitrage on FX possible?

Do you know of any papers which consider pairs trading (or statistical arbitrage) on foreign exchange? I couldn't find any. I asked this question on several forums and got no reply. Thus, I guess ...
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 ...
987 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 ...