Contains lectures presented at the Courant Institute's Mathematical Finance Seminar.

This book provides a manual on quantitative financial analysis. Focusing on advanced methods for modelling financial markets in the context of practical financial applications, it will cover data, software and techniques that will enable the reader to implement and interpret quantitative methodologies, specifically for trading and investment. Includes contributions from an international team of academics and quantitative asset managers from Morgan Stanley, Barclays Global Investors, ABN AMRO and Credit Suisse First Boston. Fills the gap for a book on applied quantitative investment & trading models Provides details of how to combine various models to manage and trade a portfolio

With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris, and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future. In March of 2006, four of the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking billions. On that night, these four men and their cohorts were the new kings of Wall Street. Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants. Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz--technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers--had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino. The quants helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse. Few realized, though, that in creating this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster. Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside story of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of their net worth vaporize--and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so fast.

Quantitative Methods for Finance and Investments ensures that readers come away from reading it with a reasonable degree of comfort and proficiency in applying elementary mathematics to several types of financial analysis. All of the methodology in this book is geared toward the development, implementation, and analysis of financial models to solve financial problems.

Two pioneers and innovators in the money management field present their choice of groundbreaking, peer-reviewed articles on subjects including portfolio engineering and long-short investment strategy. More than just a collection of classic review pieces, however, Equity Management provides new material to introduce, interpret, and integrate the pieces, with an introduction that provides an authoritative overview of the chapters. Important and innovative, it is destined to become the "Graham and Dodd" of quantitative equity investing. About the Authors: Bruce I. Jacobs and Kenneth N. Levy are Principals of Jacobs Levy Equity Management. Based in Florham Park, New Jersey, Jacobs Levy Equity Management is widely recognized as a leading provider of quantitative equity strategies for institutional clients. Jacobs Levy currently manages over $15 billion in various strategies for a prestigious global roster of 50 corporate pension plans, public retirement systems, multi-employer funds, endowments, and foundations, including over 25 of Pensions & Investments' "Top 200 Pension Funds/Sponsors." Bruce I. Jacobs holds a PhD in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Capital Ideas and Market Realities: Option Replication, Investor Behavior, and Stock Market Crashes and co-editor, with Ken Levy, of Market Neutral Strategies. He serves on the advisory board of the Journal of Portfolio Management. Kenneth N. Levy holds an MBA and an MA in applied economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-editor, with Bruce Jacobs, of Market Neutral Strategies. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he has served on the CFA Institute's candidate curriculum committee and on the advisory board of POSIT.

COVERS THE FUNDAMENTAL TOPICS IN MATHEMATICS, STATISTICS, AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT THAT ARE REQUIRED FOR A THOROUGH STUDY OF FINANCIAL MARKETS This comprehensive yet accessible book introduces students to financial markets and delves into more advanced material at a steady pace while providing motivating examples, poignant remarks, counterexamples, ideological clashes, and intuitive traps throughout. Tempered by real-life cases and actual market structures, An Introduction to Financial Markets: A Quantitative Approach accentuates theory through quantitative modeling whenever and wherever necessary. It focuses on the lessons learned from timely subject matter such as the impact of the recent subprime mortgage storm, the collapse of LTCM, and the harsh criticism on risk management and innovative finance. The book also provides the necessary foundations in stochastic calculus and optimization, alongside financial modeling concepts that are illustrated with relevant and hands-on examples. An Introduction to Financial Markets: A Quantitative Approach starts with a complete overview of the subject matter. It then moves on to sections covering fixed income assets, equity portfolios, derivatives, and advanced optimization models. This book’s balanced and broad view of the state-of-the-art in financial decision-making helps provide readers with all the background and modeling tools needed to make “honest money” and, in the process, to become a sound professional. Stresses that gut feelings are not always sufficient and that “critical thinking” and real world applications are appropriate when dealing with complex social systems involving multiple players with conflicting incentives Features a related website that contains a solution manual for end-of-chapter problems Written in a modular style for tailored classroom use Bridges a gap for business and engineering students who are familiar with the problems involved, but are less familiar with the methodologies needed to make smart decisions An Introduction to Financial Markets: A Quantitative Approach offers a balance between the need to illustrate mathematics in action and the need to understand the real life context. It is an ideal text for a first course in financial markets or investments for business, economic, statistics, engineering, decision science, and management science students.

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.