This volume contains selected papers that were presented at the International Conference COMPUTATIONAL FINANCE 1997 held at London Business School on December 15-17 1997. Formerly known as Neural Networks in the Capital Markets (NNCM), this series of meetings has emerged as a truly multi-disciplinary international conference and provided an international focus for innovative research on the application of a multiplicity of advanced decision technologies to many areas of financial engineering. It has drawn upon theoretical advances in financial economics and robust methodological developments in the statistical, econometric and computer sciences. To reflect its multi-disciplinary nature, the NNCM conference has adopted the new title COMPUTATIONAL FINANCE. The papers in this volume are organised in six parts. Market Dynamics and Risk, Trading and Arbitrage strategies, Volatility and Options, Term-Structure and Factor models, Corporate Distress Models and Advances on Methodology. This years' acceptance rate (38%) reflects both the increasing interest in the conference and the Programme Committee's efforts to improve the quality of the meeting year-on-year. I would like to thank the members of the programme committee for their efforts in refereeing the papers. I also would like to thank the members of the computational finance group at London Business School and particularly Neil Burgess, Peter Bolland, Yves Bentz, and Nevil Towers for organising the meeting.

1st International Symposium IDEAL'98

This book presents solutions for many practical problems in quantitative finance. The e-book design of the text connects theory and computational tools in an innovative way. All "quantlets" for calculation of examples in the text are executable on an XploRe Quantlet Server (XQS) and can be modified by the reader via the internet. The electronic edition can be downloaded from the web.

In recent years, Fourier transform methods have emerged as one of the major methodologies for the evaluation of derivative contracts, largely due to the need to strike a balance between the extension of existing pricing models beyond the traditional Black-Scholes setting and a need to evaluate prices consistently with the market quotes. Fourier Transform Methods in Finance is a practical and accessible guide to pricing financial instruments using Fourier transform. Written by an experienced team of practitioners and academics, it covers Fourier pricing methods; the dynamics of asset prices; non stationary market dynamics; arbitrage free pricing; generalized functions and the Fourier transform method. Readers will learn how to: compute the Hilbert transform of the pricing kernel under a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique characterise the price dynamics on a market in terms of the characteristic function, allowing for both diffusive processes and jumps apply the concept of characteristic function to non-stationary processes, in particular in the presence of stochastic volatility and more generally time change techniques perform a change of measure on the characteristic function in order to make the price process a martingale recover a general representation of the pricing kernel of the economy in terms of Hilbert transform using the theory of generalised functions apply the pricing formula to the most famous pricing models, with stochastic volatility and jumps. Junior and senior practitioners alike will benefit from this quick reference guide to state of the art models and market calibration techniques. Not only will it enable them to write an algorithm for option pricing using the most advanced models, calibrate a pricing model on options data, and extract the implied probability distribution in market data, they will also understand the most advanced models and techniques and discover how these techniques have been adjusted for applications in finance. ISBN 978-0-470-99400-9

Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach is aimed at both the finance and IT professionals involved in the structured finance business with the intention of sharing common concepts and language within the industry. The financial community (structurers, pricers and risk managers) view structured products as collections of objects under the so-called replicating portfolio paradigm. The IT community use object oriented programming (OOP) techniques to improve the software updating and maintenance process. For them structured products are collections of objects as well. Despite use of the same object concept, it looks like communication between these different professional functions has been problematic. Recently, construction of standard data structures known as FpML has begun to lay out a common definition of objects, at least for plain vanilla derivatives, both between IT and financial people and across different market players. Along this line, this book builds upon the concept of object to provide frontier treatment of structured finance issues relevant to both communities engaged in building, pricing and hedging products and people engaged in designing and up-dating the corresponding software. Structured Finance: The Object Orientated Approach will enable you to: decompose a structured product in elementary constituent financial objects and risk factors (replicating portfolio) understand the basics of object oriented programming (OOP) applied to the design of structured cash flows objects build your own objects and to understand FpML data structures available for standard products gauge risk exposures of the objects in structured products to: risk factors, their volatilities and the correlation among them (which factor are you long/short? Are you long/short volatility? Are you long/short correlation?) update your risk management system to accommodate structured products with non linear exposures and to design objects to represent, price and hedge, counterparty risk