Market_Desc: Primarily this book has been written for financial institutions (investment banks, asset management companies, investment analysis personnel, corporate treasuries, insurance companies, pension funds, risk management companies/consultants and regulatory bodies.) Special Features: "The author uses an applications-based approach."Includes the latest developments in VaR. About The Book: Models play a crucial role in today's financial markets and an understanding and appreciation of how to model financial data is key to any finance practitioner's skill set. Model developers are faced with many decisions, about the data, methodology, model specification and testing, prior to the final model implementation. This is costly and how many media reports in recent years have highlighted the mismanagement of such resources! It is crucial to make the right choices at every stage of model development. But this is as much an 'art' as a 'science'. The talented interpretation of results is just as critical for success as the mathematical foundation. This new book is the first of its kind. As well as providing numerous real world examples to illustrate concepts in an accessible manner, the accompanying CD will allow the reader to implement the examples themselves and adapt them for their own purposes. Professor Carol Alexander, Chair of Risk Management at the ISMA Centre and one of the best known names in financial data analysis, provides an authoritative and up-to-date treatment of model development. She brings many new insights to the practicalities of volatility and correlation analysis, modelling the market risk of portfolios and statistical models. New models that are based on cointegration, principal component analysis, normal mixture densities, GARCH and many other areas are elegantly and rigorously explained, with an emphasis on concepts that makes this text accessible to a very wide audience. The book is also designed to be self contained, with many technical appendices. Market Models is the ideal reference for all those involved in model selection and development

In part 1, Carol Alexander brings many new insights to the pricing and hedging of options with her understanding of volatility and correlation, and the uncertainty which surrounds these key determinants of option portfolio risk. Modelling the market risk of portfolios is covered in part 2 where the main focus is on a linear algebraic approach; the covariance matrix and principal component analysis are developed as key tools for the analysis of financial systems. The traditional time series econometric approach is explained in part 3, with coverage ranging from the application cointegration to long-short equity hedge funds, to high-frequency data prediction using neural networks and nearest neighbour algorithms . Throughout this text the emphasis is on understanding concepts and implementing solutions. It has been designed to be accessible to a very wide audience: the coverage is comprehensive and complete and the technical appendix makes the book largely self-contained.

Volume 1 of 'The Strategic Analysis of Financial Markets,' — Framework, is premised on the belief that markets can be understood only by dropping the assumptions of rationality and efficient markets in their extreme forms, and showing that markets still have an inherent order and inherent logic. But that order results primarily from the 'predictable irrationality' of investors, as well as from people's uncoordinated attempts to profit. The market patterns that result do not rely on rationality or efficiency.A framework is developed for understanding financial markets using a combination of psychology, statistics, game and gambling analysis, market history and the author's experience. It expresses analytically how professional investors and traders think about markets — as games in which other participants employ inferior, partially predictable strategies. Those strategies' interactions can be toxic and lead to booms, bubbles, busts and crashes, or can be less dramatic, leading to various patterns that are mistakenly called 'market inefficiencies' and 'stylized facts.'A logical case is constructed, starting from two foundations, the psychology of human decision making and the 'Fundamental Laws of Gambling.' Applying the Fundamental Laws to trading leads to the idea of 'gambling rationality' (grationality), replacing the efficient market's concept of 'rationality.' By classifying things that are likely to have semi-predictable price impacts (price 'distorters'), one can identify, explore through data analysis, and create winning trading ideas and systems. A structured way of doing all this is proposed: the six-step 'Strategic Analysis of Market Method.' Examples are given in this and Volume 2.Volume 2 of 'The Strategic Analysis of Financial Markets' — Trading System Analytics, continues the development of Volume 1 by introducing tools and techniques for developing trading systems and by illustrating them using real markets. The difference between these two Volumes and the rest of the literature is its rigor. It describes trading as a form of gambling that when properly executed, is quite logical, and is well known to professional gamblers and analytical traders.But even those elites might be surprised at the extent to which quantitative methods have been justified and applied, including a life cycle theory of trading systems. Apart from a few sections that develop background material, Volume 2 creates from scratch a trading system for Eurodollar futures using principles of the Strategic Analysis of Markets Method (SAMM), a principled, step-by-step approach to developing profitable trading systems. It has an entire Chapter on mechanical methods for testing and improvement of trading systems, which transcends the rather unstructured and unsatisfactory 'backtesting' literature. It presents a breakout trend following system developed using factor models. It also presents a specific pairs trading system, and discusses its life cycle from an early, highly profitable period to its eventual demise. Recent developments in momentum trading and suggestions on improvements are also discussed.

The field of financial econometrics has exploded over the last decade This book represents an integration of theory, methods, and examples using the S-PLUS statistical modeling language and the S+FinMetrics module to facilitate the practice of financial econometrics. This is the first book to show the power of S-PLUS for the analysis of time series data. It is written for researchers and practitioners in the finance industry, academic researchers in economics and finance, and advanced MBA and graduate students in economics and finance. Readers are assumed to have a basic knowledge of S-PLUS and a solid grounding in basic statistics and time series concepts. This Second Edition is updated to cover S+FinMetrics 2.0 and includes new chapters on copulas, nonlinear regime switching models, continuous-time financial models, generalized method of moments, semi-nonparametric conditional density models, and the efficient method of moments. Eric Zivot is an associate professor and Gary Waterman Distinguished Scholar in the Economics Department, and adjunct associate professor of finance in the Business School at the University of Washington. He regularly teaches courses on econometric theory, financial econometrics and time series econometrics, and is the recipient of the Henry T. Buechel Award for Outstanding Teaching. He is an associate editor of Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics. He has published papers in the leading econometrics journals, including Econometrica, Econometric Theory, the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Jiahui Wang is an employee of Ronin Capital LLC. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Washington in 1997. He has published in leading econometrics journals such as Econometrica and Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, and is the Principal Investigator of National Science Foundation SBIR grants. In 2002 Dr. Wang was selected as one of the "2000 Outstanding Scholars of the 21st Century" by International Biographical Centre.

Hedge funds are now the largest volume players in the capital markets. They follow a wide assortment of strategies but their activities have replaced and overshadowed the traditional model of the long only portfolio manager. Many of the traditional technical indicators and commonly accepted trading strategies have become obsolete or ineffective. The focus throughout the book is to describe the principal innovations that have been made within the equity markets over the last several years and that have changed the ground rules for trading activities. By understanding these changes the active trader is far better equipped to profit in today’s more complex and risky markets. Long/Short Market Dynamics includes: A completely new technique, Comparative Quantiles Analysis, for identifying market turning points is introduced. It is based on statistical techniques that can be used to recognize money flow and price/momentum divergences that can provide substantial profit opportunities. Power laws, regime shifts, self-organized criticality, phase transitions, network dynamics, econophysics, algorithmic trading and other ideas from the science of complexity are examined. All are described as concretely as possible and avoiding unnecessary mathematics and formalism. Alpha generation, portfolio construction, hedge ratios, and beta neutral portfolios are illustrated with case studies and worked examples. Episodes of financial contagion are illustrated with a proposed explanation of their origins within underlying market dynamics

Dedicated to the Russian mathematician Albert Shiryaev on his 70th birthday, this is a collection of papers written by his former students, co-authors and colleagues. The book represents the modern state of art of a quickly maturing theory and will be an essential source and reading for researchers in this area. Diversity of topics and comprehensive style of the papers make the book attractive for PhD students and young researchers.

Praise for Energy and Power Risk Management "Energy and Power Risk Management identifies and addresses the key issues in the development of the turbulent energy industry and the challenges it poses to market players. An insightful and far-reaching book written by two renowned professionals." -Helyette Geman, Professor of Finance University Paris Dauphine and ESSEC "The most up-to-date and comprehensive book on managing energy price risk in the natural gas and power markets. An absolute imperative for energy traders and energy risk management professionals." -Vincent Kaminski, Managing Director Citadel Investment Group LLC "Eydeland and Wolyniec's work does an excellent job of outlining the methods needed to measure and manage risk in the volatile energy market." -Gerald G. Fleming, Vice President, Head of East Power Trading, TXU Energy Trading "This book combines academic rigor with real-world practicality. It is a must-read for anyone in energy risk management or asset valuation." -Ron Erd, Senior Vice President American Electric Power