The Fine Structure of Asset Returns

The Fine Structure of Asset Returns
Author: Hélyette Geman
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2002
Genre:
ISBN:

We investigate the importance of diffusion and jumps in a new model for asset returns. In contrast to standard models, we allow for jump components displaying finite or infinite activity and variation. Empirical investigations of time series indicate that index dynamics are devoid of a diffusion component, which may be present in the dynamics of individual stocks. This leads to the conjecture, confirmed on options data, that the risk-neutral process should be free of a diffusion component. We conclude that the statistical and risk-neutral processes for equity prices are pure jump processes of infinite activity and finite variation.

The Fine Structure of Asset Returns, Jumps, and Stochastic Volatility

The Fine Structure of Asset Returns, Jumps, and Stochastic Volatility
Author: . Jung-Suk Yu
Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN: 9783659392009

The various models have been built upon pioneering work of Robert F. Engle (2003) and Robert C. Merton (1997) for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility and a new method to determine the value of derivatives, respectively. This book fills the gaps which Harry M. Markowitz's (1990) mean-variance analysis fails to capture. Especially, this book investigates dynamic processes of asset returns, volatility, and jumps which are time-varying and stochastic in discrete- and continuous-time settings. I demonstrate that these additional computational and modeling efforts provide us with significant benefits to better capture actual financial time-series data and to reduce option pricing errors. If we only consider mean and variance as in Markowitz, most likely we may not fully appreciate recent advances in risk managements, investments, and derivatives pricing since many researchers recognize the importance of economic and statistical roles of skewness and kurtosis. To better explain well-known skewness and excess kurtosis of financial time-series returns, I employ asymmetric fat-tailed distributions such as Hansen's skewed t-distribution and Levy jump models.

Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science: Financial Engineering

Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science: Financial Engineering
Author: John R. Birge
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 1026
Release: 2007-11-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780080553252

The remarkable growth of financial markets over the past decades has been accompanied by an equally remarkable explosion in financial engineering, the interdisciplinary field focusing on applications of mathematical and statistical modeling and computational technology to problems in the financial services industry. The goals of financial engineering research are to develop empirically realistic stochastic models describing dynamics of financial risk variables, such as asset prices, foreign exchange rates, and interest rates, and to develop analytical, computational and statistical methods and tools to implement the models and employ them to design and evaluate financial products and processes to manage risk and to meet financial goals. This handbook describes the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field in the areas of modeling and pricing financial derivatives, building models of interest rates and credit risk, pricing and hedging in incomplete markets, risk management, and portfolio optimization. Leading researchers in each of these areas provide their perspective on the state of the art in terms of analysis, computation, and practical relevance. The authors describe essential results to date, fundamental methods and tools, as well as new views of the existing literature, opportunities, and challenges for future research.

Handbook Of Heavy-tailed Distributions In Asset Management And Risk Management

Handbook Of Heavy-tailed Distributions In Asset Management And Risk Management
Author: Michele Leonardo Bianchi
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2019-03-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9813276215

The study of heavy-tailed distributions allows researchers to represent phenomena that occasionally exhibit very large deviations from the mean. The dynamics underlying these phenomena is an interesting theoretical subject, but the study of their statistical properties is in itself a very useful endeavor from the point of view of managing assets and controlling risk. In this book, the authors are primarily concerned with the statistical properties of heavy-tailed distributions and with the processes that exhibit jumps. A detailed overview with a Matlab implementation of heavy-tailed models applied in asset management and risk managements is presented. The book is not intended as a theoretical treatise on probability or statistics, but as a tool to understand the main concepts regarding heavy-tailed random variables and processes as applied to real-world applications in finance. Accordingly, the authors review approaches and methodologies whose realization will be useful for developing new methods for forecasting of financial variables where extreme events are not treated as anomalies, but as intrinsic parts of the economic process.

Fat-Tailed and Skewed Asset Return Distributions

Fat-Tailed and Skewed Asset Return Distributions
Author: Svetlozar T. Rachev
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2005-09-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0471758906

While mainstream financial theories and applications assume that asset returns are normally distributed, overwhelming empirical evidence shows otherwise. Yet many professionals don’t appreciate the highly statistical models that take this empirical evidence into consideration. Fat-Tailed and Skewed Asset Return Distributions examines this dilemma and offers readers a less technical look at how portfolio selection, risk management, and option pricing modeling should and can be undertaken when the assumption of a non-normal distribution for asset returns is violated. Topics covered in this comprehensive book include an extensive discussion of probability distributions, estimating probability distributions, portfolio selection, alternative risk measures, and much more. Fat-Tailed and Skewed Asset Return Distributions provides a bridge between the highly technical theory of statistical distributional analysis, stochastic processes, and econometrics of financial returns and real-world risk management and investments.

Exotic Option Pricing and Advanced Lévy Models

Exotic Option Pricing and Advanced Lévy Models
Author: Andreas Kyprianou
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2006-06-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0470017201

Since around the turn of the millennium there has been a general acceptance that one of the more practical improvements one may make in the light of the shortfalls of the classical Black-Scholes model is to replace the underlying source of randomness, a Brownian motion, by a Lévy process. Working with Lévy processes allows one to capture desirable distributional characteristics in the stock returns. In addition, recent work on Lévy processes has led to the understanding of many probabilistic and analytical properties, which make the processes attractive as mathematical tools. At the same time, exotic derivatives are gaining increasing importance as financial instruments and are traded nowadays in large quantities in OTC markets. The current volume is a compendium of chapters, each of which consists of discursive review and recent research on the topic of exotic option pricing and advanced Lévy markets, written by leading scientists in this field. In recent years, Lévy processes have leapt to the fore as a tractable mechanism for modeling asset returns. Exotic option values are especially sensitive to an accurate portrayal of these dynamics. This comprehensive volume provides a valuable service for financial researchers everywhere by assembling key contributions from the world's leading researchers in the field. Peter Carr, Head of Quantitative Finance, Bloomberg LP. This book provides a front-row seat to the hottest new field in modern finance: options pricing in turbulent markets. The old models have failed, as many a professional investor can sadly attest. So many of the brightest minds in mathematical finance across the globe are now in search of new, more accurate models. Here, in one volume, is a comprehensive selection of this cutting-edge research. Richard L. Hudson, former Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe, and co-author with Benoit B. Mandelbrot of The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward

Path Integrals in Quantum Mechanics, Statistics, Polymer Physics, and Financial Markets

Path Integrals in Quantum Mechanics, Statistics, Polymer Physics, and Financial Markets
Author: Hagen Kleinert
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 1512
Release: 2004
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9789812381071

This is the third, significantly expanded edition of the comprehensive textbook published in 1990 on the theory and applications of path integrals. It is the first book to explicitly solve path integrals of a wide variety of nontrivial quantum-mechanical systems, in particular the hydrogen atom. The solutions have become possible by two major advances. The first is a new euclidean path integral formula which increases the restricted range of applicability of Feynman's famous formula to include singular attractive 1/r and 1/r2 potentials. The second is a simple quantum equivalence principle governing the transformation of euclidean path integrals to spaces with curvature and torsion, which leads to time-sliced path integrals that are manifestly invariant under coordinate transformations. In addition to the time-sliced definition, the author gives a perturbative definition of path integrals which makes them invariant under coordinate transformations. A consistent implementation of this property leads to an extension of the theory of generalized functions by defining uniquely integrals over products of distributions. The powerful Feynman -- Kleinert variational approach is explained and developed systematically into a variational perturbation theory which, in contrast to ordinary perturbation theory, produces convergent expansions. The convergence is uniform from weak to strong couplings, opening a way to precise approximate evaluations of analytically unsolvable path integrals. Tunneling processes are treated in detail. The results are used to determine the lifetime of supercurrents, the stability of metastable thermodynamic phases, and the large-order behavior of perturbationexpansions. A new variational treatment extends the range of validity of previous tunneling theories from large to small barriers. A corresponding extension of large-order perturbation theory also applies now to small orders. Special attention is devoted to path integrals with topological restrictions. These are relevant to the understanding of the statistical properties of elementary particles and the entanglement phenomena in polymer physics and biophysics. The Chem-Simons theory of particles with fractional statistics (anyohs) is introduced and applied to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. The relevance of path integrals to financial markets is discussed, and improvements of the famous Black -- Scholes formula for option prices are given which account for the fact that large market fluctuations occur much more frequently than in the commonly used Gaussian distributions.

Methods and Finance

Methods and Finance
Author: Emiliano Ippoliti
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2016-12-23
Genre: Science
ISBN: 331949872X

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on finance, with a special focus on stock markets. It presents new methodologies for analyzing stock markets’ behavior and discusses theories and methods of finance from different angles, such as the mathematical, physical and philosophical ones. The book, which aims at philosophers and economists alike, represents a rare yet important attempt to unify the externalist with the internalist conceptions of finance.