What is finance? What questions does it principally concern itself with answering? What are the underpinnings of the means by which it attempts to answer those questions? And what conclusions does it reach? Written with the thoughtful reader in mind, and in a manner not requiring any prior familiarity with finance or economics, this book addresses these important fundamental questions. While not written as a how-to guide to investing, in general or in specific asset classes or marketplaces, the thoughtful reader will come away with a widely applicable conceptual framework as to how to think about doing so in virtually any investment application. Its contents are those which underpin all such markets and, overtly or not, the actions of market participants across time. It is the foundation upon which our vast financial edifice is built. And, for these reasons, the book's two authors have found it to be a fascinating and worthwhile object of thought and attention for the past eighty combined years. The book is divided into two parts. The first, entitled "Foundations," spans the initial ten chapters and concerns itself with the theory that underpins virtually all financial markets, including: Default-Free and Risk-Free Assets; Mean-Variance Theory; the Capital Asset Pricing Model and its applications; Arbitrage Pricing Theory; the Finite State Approach to Modern Finance; and Valuation. The second part, entitled "Markets," explores these financial markets in detail by way of chapters individually dedicated to each, including: stock markets; bond markets; money markets; asset backed securities; futures and forward contracts; currency markets; options; swaps; and hedge and private equity funds. The book concludes with the exploration of select paradoxes in modern finance, with explanations proffered for their existence and perpetuation.

This book exposes and comments on the consequences of Reg NMS and MiFID on market microstructure. It covers changes in market design, electronic trading, and investor and trader behaviors. The emergence of high frequency trading and critical events like the'Flash Crash' of 2010 are also analyzed in depth.Using a quantitative viewpoint, this book explains how an attrition of liquidity and regulatory changes can impact the whole microstructure of financial markets. A mathematical Appendix details the quantitative tools and indicators used through the book, allowing the reader to go further independently.This book is written by practitioners and theoretical experts and covers practical aspects (like the optimal infrastructure needed to trade electronically in modern markets) and abstract analyses (like the use on entropy measurements to understand the progress of market fragmentation).As market microstructure is a recent academic field, students will benefit from the book's overview of the current state of microstructure and will use the Appendix to understand important methodologies. Policy makers and regulators will use this book to access theoretical analyses on real cases. For readers who are practitioners, this book delivers data analysis and basic processes like the designs of Smart Order Routing and trade scheduling algorithms.In this second edition, the authors have added a large section on orderbook dynamics, showing how liquidity can predict future price moves, and how High Frequency Traders can profit from it. The section on market impact has also been updated to show how buying or selling pressure moves prices not only for a few hours, but even for days, and how prices relax (or not) after a period of intense pressure.Further, this edition includes pages on Dark Pools, Circuit Breakers and added information outside of Equity Trading, because MiFID 2 is likely to push fixed income markets towards more electronification. The authors explore what is to be expected from this change in microstructure. The appendix has also been augmented to include the propagator models (for intraday price impact), a simple version of Kyle's model (1985) for daily market impact, and a more sophisticated optimal trading framework, to support the design of trading algorithms.

Written to bridge the gap between foundational quantitative finance and market practice, this book goes beyond the basics covered in most textbooks by presenting content concerning actual industry norms, thus resulting in a clearer picture of the field for the readers. These include, for instance, the practitioner's perspective of how local versus stochastic volatility affects forward smile, or the implications of mean reversion on forward volatility.Key considerations for modelling in rates, equities and foreign exchange are presented from the perspective of common themes across various assets, as well as their individual characteristics.The discussion on models emphasizes the key aspects that are relevant to the pricing of different types of financial derivatives, so that the reader can observe how an appropriate choice of models is essential in reflecting the risk profile and hedging considerations for different products.With the knowledge gleaned from this book, readers will attain a more comprehensive understanding of market practice in derivatives modelling.

The past twenty years have seen an extraordinary growth in the use of quantitative methods in financial markets. Finance professionals now routinely use sophisticated statistical techniques in portfolio management, proprietary trading, risk management, financial consulting, and securities regulation. This graduate-level textbook is intended for PhD students, advanced MBA students, and industry professionals interested in the econometrics of financial modeling. The book covers the entire spectrum of empirical finance, including: the predictability of asset returns, tests of the Random Walk Hypothesis, the microstructure of securities markets, event analysis, the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory, the term structure of interest rates, dynamic models of economic equilibrium, and nonlinear financial models such as ARCH, neural networks, statistical fractals, and chaos theory. Each chapter develops statistical techniques within the context of a particular financial application. This exciting new text contains a unique and accessible combination of theory and practice, bringing state-of-the-art statistical techniques to the forefront of financial applications. Each chapter also includes a discussion of recent empirical evidence, for example, the rejection of the Random Walk Hypothesis, as well as problems designed to help readers incorporate what they have read into their own applications.

An informative guide to market microstructure and trading strategies Over the last decade, the financial landscape has undergone a significant transformation, shaped by the forces of technology, globalization, and market innovations to name a few. In order to operate effectively in today's markets, you need more than just the motivation to succeed, you need a firm understanding of how modern financial markets work and what professional trading is really about. Dr. Anatoly Schmidt, who has worked in the financial industry since 1997, and teaches in the Financial Engineering program of Stevens Institute of Technology, puts these topics in perspective with his new book. Divided into three comprehensive parts, this reliable resource offers a balance between the theoretical aspects of market microstructure and trading strategies that may be more relevant for practitioners. Along the way, it skillfully provides an informative overview of modern financial markets as well as an engaging assessment of the methods used in deriving and back-testing trading strategies. Details the modern financial markets for equities, foreign exchange, and fixed income Addresses the basics of market dynamics, including statistical distributions and volatility of returns Offers a summary of approaches used in technical analysis and statistical arbitrage as well as a more detailed description of trading performance criteria and back-testing strategies Includes two appendices that support the main material in the book If you're unprepared to enter today's markets you will underperform. But with Financial Markets and Trading as your guide, you'll quickly discover what it takes to make it in this competitive field.

Quantitative methods have revolutionized the area of trading, regulation, risk management, portfolio construction, asset pricing and treasury activities, and governmental activity such as central banking to name but some of the applications. Downside-risk, as a quantitative method, is an accurate measurement of investment risk, because it captures the risk of not accomplishing the investor's goal. 'Downside Risk in Financial Markets' demonstrates how downside-risk can produce better results in performance measurement and asset allocation than variance modelling. Theory, as well as the practical issues involved in its implementation, is covered and the arguments put forward emphatically show the superiority of downside risk models to variance models in terms of risk measurement and decision making. Variance considers all uncertainty to be risky. Downside-risk only considers returns below that needed to accomplish the investor's goal, to be risky. Risk is one of the biggest issues facing the financial markets today. 'Downside Risk in Financial Markets' outlines the major issues for Investment Managers and focuses on "downside-risk" as a key activity in managing risk in investment/portfolio management. Managing risk is now THE paramount topic within the financial sector and recurring losses through the 1990s has shocked financial institutions into placing much greater emphasis on risk management and control. Free Software Enclosed To help you implement the knowledge you will gain from reading this book, a CD is enclosed that contains free software programs that were previously only available to institutional investors under special licensing agreement to The pension Research Institute. This is our contribution to the advancement of professionalism in portfolio management. The Forsey-Sortino model is an executable program that: 1. Runs on any PC without the need of any additional software. 2. Uses the bootstrap procedure developed by Dr. Bradley Effron at Stanford University to uncover what could have happened, instead of relying only on what did happen in the past. This is the best procedure we know of for describing the nature of uncertainty in financial markets. 3. Fits a three parameter lognormal distribution to the bootstrapped data to allow downside risk to be calculated from a continuous distribution. This improves the efficacy of the downside risk estimates. 4. Calculates upside potential and downside risk from monthly returns on any portfolio manager. 5. Calculates upside potential and downside risk from any user defined distribution. Forsey-Sortino Source Code: 1. The source code, written in Visual Basic 5.0, is provided for institutional investors who want to add these calculations to their existing financial services. 2. No royalties are required for this source code, providing institutions inform clients of the source of these calculations. A growing number of services are now calculating downside risk in a manner that we are not comfortable with. Therefore, we want investors to know when downside risk and upside potential are calculated in accordance with the methodology described in this book. Riddles Spreadsheet: 1. Neil Riddles, former Senior Vice President and Director of Performance Analysis at Templeton Global Advisors, now COO at Hansberger Global Advisors Inc., offers a free spreadsheet in excel format. 2. The spreadsheet calculates downside risk and upside potential relative to the returns on an index Brings together a range of relevant material, not currently available in a single volume source. Provides practical information on how financial organisations can use downside risk techniques and technological developments to effectively manage risk in their portfolio management. Provides a rigorous theoretical underpinning for the use of downside risk techniques. This is important for the long-run acceptance of the methodology, since such arguments justify consultant's recommendations to pension funds and other plan sponsors.

The financial industry derives its legitimacy through the claim that it acts in the interest of shareholders. A vast international network of funds, banks, insurance companies, brokerages, rating agencies, and regulatory agencies defends its status by asserting that market mechanisms determine a company’s true value and therefore enriching shareholders contributes to the socially optimal allocation of capital. Is this how stock prices are determined in practice? What does stock valuation reveal about the supposed efficiency of markets and what it means to act on behalf of shareholders? Horacio Ortiz provides a critical analysis of the social institutions and practices that produce and regulate stock pricing and valuation. He examines how financial professionals evaluate and invest in listed companies, unraveling the contradictory definitions of financial value that shape their behavior. Ortiz demonstrates how ideologically laden notions of investing skill and efficient markets are central to the everyday practices of financial valuation, as well as how they function to justify the broader system. He scrutinizes the technical aspects of valuation and investment, their place in social relations within and among companies, and their relation to state regulation in order to demystify how the financial industry presents prices as truths that the rest of society must accept. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among stock brokers and investment management companies in New York and Paris, this book shows how the political imaginaries that underpin financial markets are central to producing, sustaining, and legitimizing global inequalities.