Mark Cummins – författare

Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and ProductsOver recent decades, the marketplace has seen an increasing integration, not only among different types of commodity markets such as energy, agricultural, and metals, but also with financial markets. This trend raises important questions about how to identify and analyse opportunities in and manage risks of commodity products. The Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and Products offers traders, commodity brokers, and other professionals a practical and comprehensive manual that covers market structure and functioning, as well as the practice of trading across a wide range of commodity markets and products. Written in non-technical language, this important resource includes the information needed to begin to master the complexities of and to operate successfully in today’s challenging and fluctuating commodity marketplace. Designed as a practical practitioner-orientated resource, the book includes a detailed overview of key markets – oil, coal, electricity, emissions, weather, industrial metals, freight, agricultural and foreign exchange – and contains a set of tools for analysing, pricing and managing risk for the individual markets. Market features and the main functioning rules of the markets in question are presented, along with the structure of basic financial products and standardised deals. A range of vital topics such as stochastic and econometric modelling, market structure analysis, contract engineering, as well as risk assessment and management are presented and discussed in detail with illustrative examples to commodity markets. The authors showcase how to structure and manage both simple and more complex multi-commodity deals. Addressing the issues of profit-making and risk management, the book reveals how to exploit pay-off profiles and trading strategies on a diversified set of commodity prices. In addition, the book explores how to price energy products and other commodities belonging to markets segmented across specific structural features. The Handbook of Multi-Commodity Markets and Products includes a wealth of proven methods and useful models that can be selected and developed in order to make appropriate estimations of the future evolution of prices and appropriate valuations of products. The authors additionally explore market risk issues and what measures of risk should be adopted for the purpose of accurately assessing exposure from multi-commodity portfolios. This vital resource offers the models, tools, strategies and general information commodity brokers and other professionals need to succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace.

Presenting state-of-the-art methods in the area, the book begins with a presentation of weak discrete time approximations of jump-diffusion stochastic differential equations for derivatives pricing and risk measurement. Using a moving least squares reconstruction, a numerical approach is then developed that allows for the construction of arbitrage-free surfaces. Free boundary problems are considered next, with particular focus on stochastic impulse control problems that arise when the cost of control includes a fixed cost, common in financial applications. The text proceeds with the development of a fear index based on equity option surfaces, allowing for the measurement of overall fear levels in the market. The problem of American option pricing is considered next, applying simulation methods combined with regression techniques and discussing convergence properties. Changing focus to integral transform methods, a variety of option pricing problems are considered. The COS method is practically applied for the pricing of options under uncertain volatility, a method developed by the authors that relies on the dynamic programming principle and Fourier cosine series expansions. Efficient approximation methods are next developed for the application of the fast Fourier transform for option pricing under multifactor affine models with stochastic volatility and jumps. Following this, fast and accurate pricing techniques are showcased for the pricing of credit derivative contracts with discrete monitoring based on the Wiener-Hopf factorisation. With an energy theme, a recombining pentanomial lattice is developed for the pricing of gas swing contracts under regime switching dynamics. The book concludes with a linear and nonlinear review of the arbitrage-free parity theory for the CDS and bond markets.

Presenting state-of-the-art methods in the area, the book begins with a presentation of weak discrete time approximations of jump-diffusion stochastic differential equations for derivatives pricing and risk measurement. Using a moving least squares reconstruction, a numerical approach is then developed that allows for the construction of arbitrage-free surfaces. Free boundary problems are considered next, with particular focus on stochastic impulse control problems that arise when the cost of control includes a fixed cost, common in financial applications. The text proceeds with the development of a fear index based on equity option surfaces, allowing for the measurement of overall fear levels in the market. The problem of American option pricing is considered next, applying simulation methods combined with regression techniques and discussing convergence properties. Changing focus to integral transform methods, a variety of option pricing problems are considered. The COS method is practically applied for the pricing of options under uncertain volatility, a method developed by the authors that relies on the dynamic programming principle and Fourier cosine series expansions. Efficient approximation methods are next developed for the application of the fast Fourier transform for option pricing under multifactor affine models with stochastic volatility and jumps. Following this, fast and accurate pricing techniques are showcased for the pricing of credit derivative contracts with discrete monitoring based on the Wiener-Hopf factorisation. With an energy theme, a recombining pentanomial lattice is developed for the pricing of gas swing contracts under regime switching dynamics. The book concludes with a linear and nonlinear review of the arbitrage-free parity theory for the CDS and bond markets.