Getting agreement between finance theory and finance practice is important like never before. In the last decade the derivatives business has grown to a staggering size, such that the outstanding notional of all contracts is now many multiples of the underlying world economy. No longer are derivatives for helping people control and manage their financial risks from other business and industries, no, it seems that the people are toiling away in the fields to keep the derivatives market afloat!...
In this updated student edition, Paul Wilmott updates and extends his earlier classic, Derivatives: The Theory and Practice of Financial Engineering. Included on CD are numerous Bloomberg screen dumps to illustrate, in real terms, the points raised in the book, along with essential Visual basic code, spreadsheet explanations of the models, and the reproduction of term sheets and option classification tables. The author presents all the current financial theories in a manner designed to make them...
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...