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
The document compares finite difference methods with Monte Carlo for pricing options on baskets of assets. It explains the dimensionality problem: a finite difference grid grows rapidly with the number of underlyings, making multidimensional PDE methods…
The document explains why ordinary Taylor expansion needs a correction when applied to functions driven by Brownian motion. Brownian increments have variance proportional to elapsed time, so the sum of their squared increments converges to elapsed time…
The document asks how to forecast the next stock move after fitting and evaluating a hidden Markov model. It points to the transition matrix as a possible part of the answer, but does not explain how to use it or provide an actual forecasting procedure. Its…
The document explains how to determine the weights of two stocks when the portfolio must achieve a specified expected return. It uses scenario probabilities and stock returns to calculate each asset’s expected return, then combines the target-return equation…
The document examines why a counterparty’s CVA charge might decrease after both parties are downgraded. It presents a first-to-default approximation in which expected exposure is multiplied by the difference between the counterparty’s credit spread and the…
The document describes building a JPY three-month forward curve from three-month deposits and FRAs, six-month market quotes, and six-month-versus-three-month basis swap spreads in QuantLib. The questioner constructs separate discounting, six-month, and…
The document explores reproducing corporate bond yield spreads under the Black–Cox structural credit model. It defines spread from face value, bond price, maturity, and the risk-free rate, then describes bond value as discounted debt recovery conditional on…
The document discusses plotting the historical minimum and maximum returns over holding periods of increasing length, alongside a central band, to visualize how observed outcomes vary by horizon. The accepted replies suggest variance ratios as a related…
The document asks whether a zero-mean, time-homogeneous Markov process starting at zero can have variance that does not increase over time. It gives a simple discrete-state example whose variance oscillates periodically, then considers a continuous-time jump…
The document poses a fixed-income valuation problem: how to calculate yield to maturity for a semiannual coupon bond that repays principal in installments before its final maturity. It provides a coupon rate, day-count convention, clean price, valuation…
The discussion addresses how to assess an intraday equity strategy whose backtest shows about one cent of gross profit per trade before transaction costs. It emphasizes that Sharpe ratio and profit per share are useful, but neither establishes viability…
The document asks why the estimated momentum coefficient in a Carhart four-factor analysis of mutual fund returns changes when the market benchmark is switched. The sample consists of 1,000 funds over 2000–2017. The reported momentum estimates are negative…
The discussion explains how to express views on ECB decisions through overnight indexed swaps (OIS) spanning meeting dates. It distinguishes a view on the size of an individual meeting’s rate change, which could be structured as an option on a spread between…
The document explains two features of a rewritten global minimum variance portfolio objective: the negative sign and the factor of one-half. A variance-minimization problem can be written as a maximization by negating the objective, which accounts for the…
The document offers a framework for choosing the sampling interval for intraday market research instead of assuming that five-minute bars are always appropriate. The researcher should match the data frequency to the trading horizon they can act on and to the…
The document shows how to count ordered outcomes for three six-sided dice according to their minimum value, then use those counts to reason about the expected payoff of a call-like contract with a strike of three. The counting method starts from rolls whose…
The document explains why several R functions for calculating price returns can produce different results. The key distinction is between arithmetic (simple) returns, calculated as the price change relative to the previous price, and logarithmic returns,…
This document examines fitting ARIMA models across rolling windows to track coefficient changes. Its central difficulty is that automatic model selection may choose a different order in each window, so the first reported coefficient may represent an…
This document surveys approaches to grouping time series that look similar, including curves with similar means but different variance or shape. One suggestion is to represent each series with informative features such as higher distribution moments,…
This document raises a question about why a five-day exponential moving average can differ when calculated from hourly closes versus minute closes. The finer series contains more observations over the same calendar span, and the author reports seeing…
This document explains how to allocate a market-cap-weighted crypto index when no constituent may exceed a chosen maximum weight. It presents a sequential calculation: start with each asset’s share of total market value, scale that share by the weight and…
The document asks how broadly to define mean-reversion and momentum strategies, including whether they correspond to particular latent-variable dynamics or more general properties of price processes. The accepted response gives informal meanings: mean…
The document discusses valuation differences between bespoke structured trades, which may be marked using consensus estimates, and listed instruments used to hedge them, which may have observable market prices. The question is whether using different marking…
The document raises whether daily historical option prices can be approximated from historical closing prices of the underlying asset. It identifies Black–Scholes as one possible pricing framework and notes that the model requires implied volatility for…