Featuring papers from the Second International Conference on Computational Finance and its Applications, the text includes papers that encompass a wide range of topics such as risk management, derivatives pricing, credit risk, trading strategies, portfolio management and asset allocation, and market analysis.
Computational finance is an interdisciplinary field which joins financial mathematics, stochastics, numerics and scientific computing. Its task is to estimate as accurately and efficiently as possible the risks that financial instruments generate. This volume consists of a series of cutting-edge surveys of recent developments in the field written by leading international experts. These make the subject accessible to a wide readership in academia and financial businesses. The book consists of 13 chapters divided into 3 parts: foundations, algorithms and applications. Besides surveys of existing results, the book contains many new previously unpublished results.
Featuring papers from the Third International Conference on Computational Finance and its Applications, the text includes papers that encompass a wide range of topics such as modern financial services technologies, derivatives pricing, portfolio management and asset allocation, and intelligent trading agents.
Arguably the strongest addition to numerical finance of the past decade, Algorithmic Adjoint Differentiation (AAD) is the technology implemented in modern financial software to produce thousands of accurate risk sensitivities, within seconds, on light hardware. AAD recently became a centerpiece of modern financial systems and a key skill for all quantitative analysts, developers, risk professionals or anyone involved with derivatives. It is increasingly taught in Masters and PhD programs in finance. Danske Bank's wide scale implementation of AAD in its production and regulatory systems won the In-House System of the Year 2015 Risk award. The Modern Computational Finance books, written by three of the very people who designed Danske Bank's systems, offer a unique insight into the modern implementation of financial models. The volumes combine financial modelling, mathematics and programming to resolve real life financial problems and produce effective derivatives software. This volume is a complete, self-contained learning reference for AAD, and its application in finance. AAD is explained in deep detail throughout chapters that gently lead readers from the theoretical foundations to the most delicate areas of an efficient implementation, such as memory management, parallel implementation and acceleration with expression templates. The book comes with professional source code in C++, including an efficient, up to date implementation of AAD and a generic parallel simulation library. Modern C++, high performance parallel programming and interfacing C++ with Excel are also covered. The book builds the code step-by-step, while the code illustrates the concepts and notions developed in the book.
Tools for Computational Finance offers a clear explanation of computational issues arising in financial mathematics. The new third edition is thoroughly revised and significantly extended, including an extensive new section on analytic methods, focused mainly on interpolation approach and quadratic approximation. Other new material is devoted to risk-neutrality, early-exercise curves, multidimensional Black-Scholes models, the integral representation of options and the derivation of the Black-Scholes equation. New figures, more exercises, and expanded background material make this guide a real must-to-have for everyone working in the world of financial engineering.
The book covers a wide range of topics, yet essential, in Computational Finance (CF), understood as a mix of Finance, Computational Statistics, and Mathematics of Finance. In that regard it is unique in its kind, for it touches upon the basic principles of all three main components of CF, with hands-on examples for programming models in R. Thus, the first chapter gives an introduction to the Principles of Corporate Finance: the markets of stock and options, valuation and economic theory, framed within Computation and Information Theory (e.g. the famous Efficient Market Hypothesis is stated in terms of computational complexity, a new perspective). Chapters 2 and 3 give the necessary tools of Statistics for analyzing financial time series, it also goes in depth into the concepts of correlation, causality and clustering. Chapters 4 and 5 review the most important discrete and continuous models for financial time series. Each model is provided with an example program in R. Chapter 6 covers the essentials of Technical Analysis (TA) and Fundamental Analysis. This chapter is suitable for people outside academics and into the world of financial investments, as a primer in the methods of charting and analysis of value for stocks, as it is done in the financial industry. Moreover, a mathematical foundation to the seemly ad-hoc methods of TA is given, and this is new in a presentation of TA. Chapter 7 reviews the most important heuristics for optimization: simulated annealing, genetic programming, and ant colonies (swarm intelligence) which is material to feed the computer savvy readers. Chapter 8 gives the basic principles of portfolio management, through the mean-variance model, and optimization under different constraints which is a topic of current research in computation, due to its complexity. One important aspect of this chapter is that it teaches how to use the powerful tools for portfolio analysis from the RMetrics R-package. Chapter 9 is a natural continuation of chapter 8 into the new area of research of online portfolio selection. The basic model of the universal portfolio of Cover and approximate methods to compute are also described.
This book explores the technical, social and cultural implications of the emerging Information and communication technologies, addressing the technological and scientific development within education, commerce, governance, and security with a special emphasis on the impact on individuals, culture and society. Bringing together papers from the Second International Conference on Advances in Education, Commerce & Governance: Technology's Impact on Individuals, Culture and Society, the text will be of interest to researchers and academics working in areas related to the social, psychological and cultural impact of information communications technology (ICT). Specifically the book addresses a wide range of topics as diverse as: E-Commerce and E-Governance; Data and Information Privacy; Psychology; Gender; Culture; New Learning.
This book is a detailed and step-by-step introduction to the mathematical foundations of ordinary and partial differential equations, their approximation by the finite difference method and applications to computational finance. The book is structured so that it can be read by beginners, novices and expert users. Part A Mathematical Foundation for One-Factor Problems Chapters 1 to 7 introduce the mathematical and numerical analysis concepts that are needed to understand the finite difference method and its application to computational finance. Part B Mathematical Foundation for Two-Factor Problems Chapters 8 to 13 discuss a number of rigorous mathematical techniques relating to elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations in two space variables. In particular, we develop strategies to preprocess and modify a PDE before we approximate it by the finite difference method, thus avoiding ad-hoc and heuristic tricks. Part C The Foundations of the Finite Difference Method (FDM) Chapters 14 to 17 introduce the mathematical background to the finite difference method for initial boundary value problems for parabolic PDEs. It encapsulates all the background information to construct stable and accurate finite difference schemes. Part D Advanced Finite Difference Schemes for Two-Factor Problems Chapters 18 to 22 introduce a number of modern finite difference methods to approximate the solution of two factor partial differential equations. This is the only book we know of that discusses these methods in any detail. Part E Test Cases in Computational Finance Chapters 23 to 26 are concerned with applications based on previous chapters. We discuss finite difference schemes for a wide range of one-factor and two-factor problems. This book is suitable as an entry-level introduction as well as a detailed treatment of modern methods as used by industry quants and MSc/MFE students in finance. The topics have applications to numerical analysis, science and engineering. More on computational finance and the author’s online courses, see www.datasim.nl.
One of the best languages for the development of financial engineering and instrument pricing applications is C++. This book has several features that allow developers to write robust, flexible and extensible software systems. The book is an ANSI/ISO standard, fully object-oriented and interfaces with many third-party applications. It has support for templates and generic programming, massive reusability using templates (?write once?) and support for legacy C applications. In this book, author Daniel J. Duffy brings C++ to the next level by applying it to the design and implementation of classes, libraries and applications for option and derivative pricing models. He employs modern software engineering techniques to produce industrial-strength applications: Using the Standard Template Library (STL) in finance Creating your own template classes and functions Reusable data structures for vectors, matrices and tensors Classes for numerical analysis (numerical linear algebra ?) Solving the Black Scholes equations, exact and approximate solutions Implementing the Finite Difference Method in C++ Integration with the ?Gang of Four? Design Patterns Interfacing with Excel (output and Add-Ins) Financial engineering and XML Cash flow and yield curves Included with the book is a CD containing the source code in the Datasim Financial Toolkit. You can use this to get up to speed with your C++ applications by reusing existing classes and libraries. 'Unique... Let's all give a warm welcome to modern pricing tools.' -- Paul Wilmott, mathematician, author and fund manager
Computational finance is increasingly important in the financial industry, as a necessary instrument for applying theoretical models to real-world challenges. Indeed, many models used in practice involve complex mathematical problems, for which an exact or a closed-form solution is not available. Consequently, we need to rely on computational techniques and specific numerical algorithms. This book combines theoretical concepts with practical implementation. Furthermore, the numerical solution of models is exploited, both to enhance the understanding of some mathematical and statistical notions, and to acquire sound programming skills in MATLAB®, which is useful for several other programming languages also. The material assumes the reader has a relatively limited knowledge of mathematics, probability, and statistics. Hence, the book contains a short description of the fundamental tools needed to address the two main fields of quantitative finance: portfolio selection and derivatives pricing. Both fields are developed here, with a particular emphasis on portfolio selection, where the author includes an overview of recent approaches. The book gradually takes the reader from a basic to medium level of expertise by using examples and exercises to simplify the understanding of complex models in finance, giving them the ability to place financial models in a computational setting. The book is ideal for courses focusing on quantitative finance, asset management, mathematical methods for economics and finance, investment banking, and corporate finance.