Applied Quantitative Finance – serie

Providing the most up-to-date tools and techniques for pricing interest rate and credit products for the new financial world, this book discusses pricing and hedging, funding and regulation, and interpretation, as an essential resource for quantitatively minded practitioners and researchers in finance.

Since the development of the Black-Scholes model, research on equity derivatives has evolved rapidly to the point where it is now difficult to cut through the myriad of literature to find relevant material. Written by a quant with many years of experience in the field this book provides an up-to-date account of equity and equity-hybrid (equity-rates, equity-credit, equity-foreign exchange) derivatives modeling from a practitioner's perspective. The content reflects the requirements of practitioners in financial institutions: Quants will find a survey of state-of-the-art models and guidance on how to efficiently implement them with regards to market data representation, calibration, and sensitivity computation. Traders and structurers will learn about structured products, selection of the most appropriate models, as well as efficient hedging methods while risk managers will better understand market, credit, and model risk and find valuable information on advanced correlation concepts.Equity Derivatives and Hybrids provides exhaustive coverage of both market standard and new approaches, including: -Empirical properties of stock returns including autocorrelation and jumps-Dividend discount models-Non-Markovian and discrete-time volatility processes-Correlation skew modeling via copula as well as local and stochastic correlation factors-Hybrid modeling covering local and stochastic processes for interest rate, hazard rate, and volatility as well as closed form solutions -Credit, debt, and funding valuation adjustment (CVA, DVA, FVA)-Monte Carlo techniques for sensitivities including algorithmic differentiation, path recycling, as well as multilevel.Written in a highly accessible manner with examples, applications, research, and ideas throughout, this book provides a valuable resource for quantitative-minded practitioners and researchers.

Interest rate traders have been using the SABR model to price vanilla products for more than a decade. However this model suffers however from a severe limitation: its inability to value exotic products. A term structure model à la LIBOR Market Model (LMM) is often employed to value these more complex derivatives, however the LMM is unable to capture the volatility smile. A joint SABR LIBOR Market Model is the natural evolution towards a consistent pricing of vanilla and exotic products. Knowledge of these models is essential to all aspiring interest rate quants, traders and risk managers, as well an understanding of their failings and alternatives.SABR and SABR Libor Market Models in Practice is an accessible guide to modern interest rate modelling. Rather than covering an array of models which are seldom used in practice, it focuses on the SABR model, the market standard for vanilla products, the LIBOR Market Model, the most commonly used model for exotic products andthe extended SABR LIBOR Market Model. The book takes a hands-on approach, demonstrating simply how to implement and work with these models in a market setting. It bridges the gap between the understanding of the models from a conceptual and mathematical perspective and the actual implementation by supplementing the interest rate theory with modelling specific, practical code examples written in Python.

Nominal yields on government debt in several countries have fallen very near their zero lower bound (ZLB), causing a liquidity trap and limiting the capacity to stimulate economic growth. This book provides a comprehensive reference to ZLB structure modeling in an applied setting.

As power and gas markets are becoming more and more mature and globally competitive, the importance of reaching maximum potential economic efficiency is fundamental in all the sectors of the value chain, from investments selection to asset optimization, trading and sales. Optimization techniques can be used in many different fields of the energy industry, in order to reduce production and financial costs, increase sales revenues and mitigate all kinds of risks potentially affecting the economic margin. For this reason the industry has now focused its attention on the general concept of optimization and to the different techniques (mainly mathematical techniques) to reach it.Optimization Methods for Gas and Power Markets presents both theoretical elements and practical examples for solving energy optimization issues in gas and power markets. Starting with the theoretical framework and the basic business and economics of power and gas optimization, it quickly moves on to review the mathematical optimization problems inherent to the industry, and their solutions – all supported with examples from the energy sector. Coverage ranges from very long-term (and capital intensive) optimization problems such as investment valuation/diversification to asset (gas and power) optimization/hedging problems, and pure trading decisions.This book first presents the readers with various examples of optimization problems arising in power and gas markets, then deals withgeneral optimization problems and describes the mathematical tools useful for their solution. The remainder of the book is dedicated to presenting a number of key business cases which apply the proposed techniques to concrete market problems. Topics include static asset optimization, real option evaluation, dynamic optimization of structured products like swing, virtual storage or virtual power plant contracts and optimal trading in intra-day power markets. As the book progresses, so too does the level of mathematical complexity, providing readers with an appreciation of the growing sophistication of even common problems in current market practice.Optimization Methods for Gas and Power Markets provides a valuable quantitative guide to the technicalities of optimization methodologies in gas and power markets; it is essential reading for practitioners in the energy industry and financial sector who work in trading, quantitative analysis and energy risk modeling.

The series of recent financial crises have thrown open the world of quantitative finance and financial modeling. This book brings together proven and new methodologies from finance, physics and engineering, along with years of industry and academic experience to provide a cookbook of models for dealing with the challenges of today's markets.

This book is a one-stop-shop reference for risk management practitioners involved in the validation of risk models. It is a comprehensive manual about the tools, techniques and processes to be followed, focused on all the models that are relevant in the capital requirements and supervisory review of large international banks.

Written by a practitioner with years working in CVA, FVA and DVA this is a thorough, practical guide to a topic at the very core of the derivatives industry. It takes readers through all aspects of counterparty credit risk management and the business cycle of CVA, DVA and FVA, focusing on risk management, pricing considerations and implementation.

Barrier options are a class of highly path-dependent exotic options which present particular challenges to practitioners in all areas of the financial industry. They are traded heavily as stand-alone contracts in the Foreign Exchange (FX) options market, their trading volume being second only to that of vanilla options. The FX options industry has correspondingly shown great innovation in this class of products and in the models that are used to value and risk-manage them. FX structured products commonly include barrier features, and in order to analyse the effects that these features have on the overall structured product, it is essential first to understand how individual barrier options work and behave. FX Barrier Options takes a quantitative approach to barrier options in FX environments. Its primary perspectives are those of quantitative analysts, both in the front office and in control functions. It presents and explains concepts in a highly intuitive manner throughout, to allow quantitatively minded traders, structurers, marketers, salespeople and software engineers to acquire a more rigorous analytical understanding of these products. The book derives, demonstrates and analyses a wide range of models, modelling techniques and numerical algorithms that can be used for constructing valuation models and risk-management methods. Discussions focus on the practical realities of the market and demonstrate the behaviour of models based on real and recent market data across a range of currency pairs. It furthermore offers a clear description of the history and evolution of the different types of barrier options, and elucidates a great deal of industry nomenclature and jargon.

This book provides a comprehensive guide for modern derivatives pricing and credit analysis. Written to provide sound theoretical detail but practical implication, it provides readers with everything they need to know to price modern financial derivatives and analyze the credit exposure of a financial instrument in today's markets.

Commodity markets present several challenges for quantitative modeling. These include high volatilities, small sample data sets, and physical, operational complexity. In addition, the set of traded products in commodity markets is more limited than in financial or equity markets, making value extraction through trading more difficult. These facts make it very easy for modeling efforts to run into serious problems, as many models are very sensitive to noise and hence can easily fail in practice. Modeling and Valuation of Energy Structures is a comprehensive guide to quantitative and statistical approaches that have been successfully employed in support of trading operations, reflecting the author's 17 years of experience as a front-office 'quant'. The major theme of the book is that simpler is usually better, a message that is drawn out through the reality of incomplete markets, small samples, and informational constraints. The necessary mathematical tools for understanding these issues are thoroughly developed, with many techniques (analytical, econometric, and numerical) collected in a single volume for the first time. A particular emphasis is placed on the central role that the underlying market resolution plays in valuation. Examples are provided to illustrate that robust, approximate valuations are to be preferred to overly ambitious attempts at detailed qualitative modeling.

Providing the most up-to-date tools and techniques for pricing interest rate and credit products for the new financial world, this book discusses pricing and hedging, funding and regulation, and interpretation, as an essential resource for quantitatively minded practitioners and researchers in finance.

Following the financial crisis dramatic market changes, a new standard in interest rate modelling emerged, called the multi-curve framework. The author provides a detailed analysis of the framework, through its foundations, evolution and implementation. The book also covers recent extensions to collateral and stochastic spreads modelling.

The series of recent financial crises have thrown open the world of quantitative finance and financial modeling. This book brings together proven and new methodologies from finance, physics and engineering, along with years of industry and academic experience to provide a cookbook of models for dealing with the challenges of today's markets.

A new standard in interest rate modelling, called the multi-curve framework, emerged after the financial crisis. The framework covers two important market features: the collateralisation of derivative trades and the spread between different rate benchmarks. This book starts from the collateral mechanisms and builds the full framework from the foundations through all the technical and financial details. It kicks off with the collateral discounting in all its variants: domestic cash, foreign cash, or other assets and then introduces the different benchmarks and their associated spreads. Following the discontinuation of certain benchmarks, part of the book is dedicated to the transition and the emergence of the overnight benchmark dominance in certain currencies. Based on the theoretical framework of the first chapters, the important curve calibration mechanism is analysed in detail. Many instruments are investigated with all their practical peculiarities. Most of the book is dedicated to the understanding of the “static” interest rate curves. The book’s last part deals with the building blocks of any dynamic model explaining their future behaviour and apply some of those models to the most liquid instruments. Based on more than 25 years of experience as a trader and quantitative analyst in the related markets, the author includes many details on implementation in libraries and using the framework in risk management, which will be of interest to traders, risk managers, quantitative analysts, and actuaries alongside professors, researchers, and students of banking, insurance, risk management, and quantitative finance.

This book provides an advanced guide to correlation modelling for credit portfolios, providing both theoretical underpinnings and practical implementation guidance. The book picks up where pre-crisis credit books left off, offering guidance for quants on the latest tools and techniques for credit portfolio modelling in the presence of CVA (Credit Value Adjustments). Written at an advanced level, it assumes that readers are familiar with the fundamentals of credit modelling covered, for example, in the market leading books by Schonbucher (2003) and O’Kane (2008). Coverage will include the latest default correlation approaches; correlation modelling in the ‘Marshall-Olkin’ contagion framework, in the context of CVA; numerical implementation; and pricing, calibration and risk challenges.The explosive growth of credit derivatives markets in the early-to-mid 000’s was bought to a close by the 2007 financial crisis, where these instruments were held largely to blame for the economic downturn. However, in the wake of increased regulation across all financial instruments and the challenge of buying and selling bonds in large amounts, credit derivatives have once again been found to be the answer and the market has grown significantly.Written by a practitioner for practitioners, this book will also interest researchers in mathematical finance who want to understand how things happen and work ‘on the floor’. Building the reader’s knowledge from the ground up, and with numerous real life examples used throughout, this book will  prove a popular reference for anyone with a mathematical mind interested credit markets.