This comprehensive book presents a systematic and practically oriented approach to mathematical modeling in finance, particularly in the foreign exchange context. It describes all the relevant aspects of financial engineering, including derivative pricing, in detail. The book is self-contained, with the necessary mathematical, economic, and trading background carefully explained. In addition to the lucid treatment of the standard material, it describes many original results. The book can be used both as a text for students of financial engineering, and as a basic reference for risk managers, traders, and academics.
This comprehensive book presents a systematic and practically oriented approach to mathematical modeling in finance, particularly in the foreign exchange context. It describes all the relevant aspects of financial engineering, including derivative pricing, in detail. The book is self-contained, with the necessary mathematical, economic, and trading background carefully explained. In addition to the lucid treatment of the standard material, it describes many original results.The book can be used both as a text for students of financial engineering, and as a basic reference for risk managers, traders, and academics.
Praise for Foreign Exchange "Tim Weithers starts by telling the reader that foreign exchange is not difficult, just confusing, but Foreign Exchange: A Practical Guide to the FX Markets proves that money is much more exciting than anything it buys. This useful book is a whirlwind tour of the world's largest market, and the tour guide is an expert storyteller, inserting numerous fascinating insights and quirky facts throughout the book." -John R. Taylor, Chairman, CEO and CIO, FX Concepts "The book reflects the author's doctorate from the University of Chicago, several years' experience as an economics professor, and, most recently, a very successful decade as an executive at a huge international bank. These fundamental ingredients are seasoned with bits of wisdom and experience. What results is a very tasty intellectual stew." -Professor Jack Clark Francis, PhD, Professor of Economics and Finance, Bernard Baruch College "In this book, Tim Weithers clearly explains a very complicated subject. Foreign Exchange is full of jargon and conventions that make it very hard for non-professionals to gain a good understanding. Weither's book is a must for any student or professional who wants to learn the secrets of FX." -Niels O. Nygaard, Director of Financial Mathematics, The University of Chicago "An excellent text for students and practitioners who want to become acquainted with the arcane world of the foreign exchange market." -David DeRosa, PhD, founder, DeRosa Research and Trading, Inc., and Adjunct Professor of Finance, Yale School of Management "Tim Weithers provides a superb introduction to the arcana of foreign exchange markets. While primarily intended for practitioners, the book would be a valuable introduction for students with some knowledge of economics. The text is exceptionally clear with numeric examples and exercises that reinforce concepts. Frequent references are made to the economic theory behind the trading practices." -John F. O'Connell, Professor of Economics, College of the Holy Cross
This book covers foreign exchange options from the point of view of the finance practitioner. It contains everything a quant or trader working in a bank or hedge fund would need to know about the mathematics of foreign exchange—not just the theoretical mathematics covered in other books but also comprehensive coverage of implementation, pricing and calibration. With content developed with input from traders and with examples using real-world data, this book introduces many of the more commonly requested products from FX options trading desks, together with the models that capture the risk characteristics necessary to price these products accurately. Crucially, this book describes the numerical methods required for calibration of these models – an area often neglected in the literature, which is nevertheless of paramount importance in practice. Thorough treatment is given in one unified text to the following features: Correct market conventions for FX volatility surface construction Adjustment for settlement and delayed delivery of options Pricing of vanillas and barrier options under the volatility smile Barrier bending for limiting barrier discontinuity risk near expiry Industry strength partial differential equations in one and several spatial variables using finite differences on nonuniform grids Fourier transform methods for pricing European options using characteristic functions Stochastic and local volatility models, and a mixed stochastic/local volatility model Three-factor long-dated FX model Numerical calibration techniques for all the models in this work The augmented state variable approach for pricing strongly path-dependent options using either partial differential equations or Monte Carlo simulation Connecting mathematically rigorous theory with practice, this is the essential guide to foreign exchange options in the context of the real financial marketplace.
QFINANCE: The Ultimate Resource (5th edition) is the first-step reference for the finance professional or student of finance. Its coverage and author quality reflect a fine blend of practitioner and academic expertise, whilst providing the reader with a thorough education in the may facets of finance.
QFINANCE: The Ultimate Resource (4th edition) offers both practical and thought-provoking articles for the finance practitioner, written by leading experts from the markets and academia. The coverage is expansive and in-depth, with key themes which include balance sheets and cash flow, regulation, investment, governance, reputation management, and Islamic finance encompassed in over 250 best practice and thought leadership articles. This edition will also comprise key perspectives on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors -- essential for understanding the long-term sustainability of a company, whether you are an investor or a corporate strategist. Also included: Checklists: more than 250 practical guides and solutions to daily financial challenges; Finance Information Sources: 200+ pages spanning 65 finance areas; International Financial Information: up-to-date country and industry data; Management Library: over 130 summaries of the most popular finance titles; Finance Thinkers: 50 biographies covering their work and life; Quotations and Dictionary.
Topics covered in this volume (large deviations, differential geometry, asymptotic expansions, central limit theorems) give a full picture of the current advances in the application of asymptotic methods in mathematical finance, and thereby provide rigorous solutions to important mathematical and financial issues, such as implied volatility asymptotics, local volatility extrapolation, systemic risk and volatility estimation. This volume gathers together ground-breaking results in this field by some of its leading experts. Over the past decade, asymptotic methods have played an increasingly important role in the study of the behaviour of (financial) models. These methods provide a useful alternative to numerical methods in settings where the latter may lose accuracy (in extremes such as small and large strikes, and small maturities), and lead to a clearer understanding of the behaviour of models, and of the influence of parameters on this behaviour. Graduate students, researchers and practitioners will find this book very useful, and the diversity of topics will appeal to people from mathematical finance, probability theory and differential geometry.
The present volume is dedicated to Marek Musiela, an eminent scholar and practitioner who is perhaps best-known for his important contributions to problems of derivative pricing, theory of term structure of interest rates, theory of defaultable securities and other topics in modern mathematical finance. It includes 25 research papers by 47 authors, established experts and newcomers alike, that cover the whole range of the "hot" topics in the discipline. The contributed articles not only give a clear picture about what is going on in this rapidly developing field of knowledge but provide methods ready for practical implementation. They also open new prospects for further studies in risk management, portfolio optimization and financial engineering.
The concept of local volatility as well as the local volatility model are one of the classical topics of mathematical finance. Although the existing literature is wide, there still exist various problems that have not drawn sufficient attention so far, for example: a) construction of analytical solutions of the Dupire equation for an arbitrary shape of the local volatility function; b) construction of parametric or non-parametric regression of the local volatility surface suitable for fast calibration; c) no-arbitrage interpolation and extrapolation of the local and implied volatility surfaces; d) extension of the local volatility concept beyond the Black-Scholes model, etc. Also, recent progresses in deep learning and artificial neural networks as applied to financial engineering have made it reasonable to look again at various classical problems of mathematical finance including that of building a no-arbitrage local/implied volatility surface and calibrating it to the option market data.This book was written with the purpose of presenting new results previously developed in a series of papers and explaining them consistently, starting from the general concept of Dupire, Derman and Kani and then concentrating on various extensions proposed by the author and his co-authors. This volume collects all the results in one place, and provides some typical examples of the problems that can be efficiently solved using the proposed methods. This also results in a faster calibration of the local and implied volatility surfaces as compared to standard approaches.The methods and solutions presented in this volume are new and recently published, and are accompanied by various additional comments and considerations. Since from the mathematical point of view, the level of details is closer to the applied rather than to the abstract or pure theoretical mathematics, the book could also be recommended to graduate students with majors in computational or quantitative finance, financial engineering or even applied mathematics. In particular, the author used to teach some topics of this book as a part of his special course on computational finance at the Tandon School of Engineering, New York University.
