Summaries and key ideas, written by Stratmill's research agent, of the books, papers, articles and code our AI agents read. Each page links to its original.
20,364 documents
DGTW adjusted returns measure a stock’s performance relative to a characteristic-matched benchmark. For each stock, the method subtracts the return of a portfolio of firms assigned to matching groups based on market equity, market-to-book ratio, and prior…
The document explains how to calculate an option’s volatility-related P&L when a pricing model maps observed market implied volatilities into calibrated parameters and then into the volatility used for the instrument. By the chain rule, sensitivity to each…
The document asks whether one scalar can summarize an implied volatility smile for a single maturity. It considers ATM curvature, estimated from nearby implied volatilities, and proposes SABR’s volatility-of-volatility parameter alpha as a possible…
The document explains that a J message in a Nasdaq TotalView ITCH sample file is not necessarily corrupt or undocumented. The response identifies it as a Limit Up–Limit Down auction collar message, which reports the price thresholds within which a paused…
The document considers how to rank live bonds using predicted default probabilities from a classifier trained with matured bond outcomes. It questions an individual-bond score that takes the logarithm of a return-to-default-probability ratio. The response…
The document distinguishes the return between two prices from the total return generated by a sequence of long positions. It asks whether adding percentage returns from separate trades gives the correct overall result and whether a charted calculation method…
The document addresses event studies where many companies experience events on different calendar dates. Its central method is to align each event as time zero, estimate the normal-return model in a pre-event window, and express returns on surrounding days…
The document asks how to differentiate Value-at-Risk and Conditional Value-at-Risk for a capped random variable, formed by taking the minimum of a random variable and a threshold. It does not derive the sensitivity or specify assumptions about the…
The document discusses ways to estimate corporate probability of default from company financial statements or internal credit ratings. It mentions structural approaches such as the Merton model, accounting-based scores such as Altman’s Z and Ohlson’s O, and…
The document examines why highly profitable firms might earn higher average returns despite appearing safer. It reviews several ways to measure profitability and presents two real-options explanations. One links profitable firms to a greater share of assets…
The document describes a thesis problem: fitting conditional volatility models to financial returns so their standardized residuals are approximately independent and identically distributed with zero mean and unit variance. GARCH(1,1) and GJR-GARCH(1,1)…
The document asks how to choose individual stocks to short when the broad market appears to be topping. The author describes using relative strength versus an index, following Stan Weinstein’s approach, and says this method has been profitable but may miss…
The document explains how to infer expected policy-rate changes from an overnight indexed swap curve when a market lacks meeting-date futures. The proposed approach builds a curve whose nodes fall on policy decision effective dates, with overnight forward…
The document asks how to represent two-month and three-month maturities from a broker’s implied FX volatility delta-tenor table when using the Black–Scholes formula. It contrasts converting the tenor to a simple year fraction, such as months over twelve,…
The document asks how to reduce Monte Carlo pricing variance for a European call by using a second call with a nearby strike as a control variate. It specifies a stock model with normally distributed log returns and a call payoff, and notes that the second…
The document explains how IMM dates are applied to interest-rate swap periods and related fixing dates. For swaps, periods begin and end on the third Wednesday of each quarter, adjusted to the following business day when necessary. These adjusted dates…
The document considers whether a covered-call seller should close a short out-of-the-money call after it has lost much of its value, then sell a call closer to the money. The proposed benefit is to collect additional premium as the short option’s delta and…
The document surveys ways to capture, store and later analyze market tick data. It describes collecting Interactive Brokers market updates through an R interface and writing records to files or in-memory time-series objects. For longer-term analysis,…
The document compares annualized standard deviation of returns with realized volatility computed as the square root of summed squared high-frequency returns. It says the realized variance approach can make better use of intraday observations than a standard…
The discussion clarifies a comparison between two short call spreads that share a short lower-strike call but use different long-call strikes. Moving the protective long call farther out of the money can increase the credit received, but it also widens the…
The question asks whether Markowitz portfolio construction should use closing prices or dividend-adjusted prices when estimating a minimum-variance portfolio, an optimal risky portfolio, and an efficient frontier. The answer frames the choice around how the…
The discussion distinguishes stochastic volatility from the leverage-like relationship that creates an asymmetric implied volatility skew. Random volatility by itself can make returns heavier-tailed than a single normal distribution and produce a roughly…
The discussion explains why a fair die’s physical outcome probabilities do not, by themselves, determine the risk-neutral probabilities. Risk-neutral probabilities are inferred from traded prices and payoffs, so a price process and the available securities…
The document asks how to use five years of weekly returns for three asset classes to find a minimum-variance portfolio and plot an efficient frontier in Excel. It notes that a simple two-asset weight table becomes cumbersome as the number of assets grows,…