Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services . Finance activities take place in financial systems at various scopes, thus the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance.
Myron Samuel Scholes is a Canadian-American financial economist. Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, and co-originator of the Black–Scholes options pricing model. Scholes is currently the chairman of the Board of Economic Advisers of Stamos Capital Partners. Previously he served as the chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management and on the Dimensional Fund Advisors board of directors, American Century Mutual Fund board of directors and the Cutwater Advisory Board. He was a principal and limited partner at Long-Term Capital Management and a managing director at Salomon Brothers. Other positions Scholes held include the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, director of the Center for Research in Security Prices, and professor of finance at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Scholes earned his PhD at the University of Chicago.
A swaption is an option granting its owner the right but not the obligation to enter into an underlying swap. Although options can be traded on a variety of swaps, the term "swaption" typically refers to options on interest rate swaps.
Fixed income refers to any type of investment under which the borrower or issuer is obliged to make payments of a fixed amount on a fixed schedule. For example, the borrower may have to pay interest at a fixed rate once a year and repay the principal amount on maturity. Fixed-income securities — more commonly known as bonds — can be contrasted with equity securities – often referred to as stocks and shares – that create no obligation to pay dividends or any other form of income. Bonds carry a level of legal protections for investors that equity securities do not — in the event of a bankruptcy, bond holders would be repaid after liquidation of assets, whereas shareholders with stock often receive nothing.
Monte Carlo methods are used in corporate finance and mathematical finance to value and analyze (complex) instruments, portfolios and investments by simulating the various sources of uncertainty affecting their value, and then determining the distribution of their value over the range of resultant outcomes. This is usually done by help of stochastic asset models. The advantage of Monte Carlo methods over other techniques increases as the dimensions of the problem increase.
In financial economics, asset pricing refers to a formal treatment and development of two main pricing principles, outlined below, together with the resultant models. There have been many models developed for different situations, but correspondingly, these stem from either general equilibrium asset pricing or rational asset pricing, the latter corresponding to risk neutral pricing.
Financial modeling is the task of building an abstract representation of a real world financial situation. This is a mathematical model designed to represent the performance of a financial asset or portfolio of a business, project, or any other investment.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:
A master's degree in quantitative finance concerns the application of mathematical methods to the solution of problems in financial economics. There are several like-titled degrees which may further focus on financial engineering, computational finance, mathematical finance, and/or financial risk management.
Jim Gatheral is a researcher in the field of mathematical finance, who has contributed to the study of volatility as applied to the pricing and risk management of derivatives. A recurrent subject in his books and papers is the volatility smile, and he published in 2006 a book The Volatility Surface based on a course he taught for six years at New York University, along with Nassim Taleb. More recently his work has moved in the direction of market microstructure, especially as applied to algorithmic trading. He is the author of The Volatility Surface: A Practitioner's Guide.
Robert W. Baird & Co. is an American multinational independent investment bank and financial services company. It is the principal U.S. operating subsidiary of Baird, an international, employee-owned financial services firm providing investment banking, capital markets, private equity, wealth management, and asset management services to individuals, corporations, institutional investors, and municipalities.
A basket option is a financial derivative, more specifically an exotic option, whose underlying is a weighted sum or average of different assets that have been grouped together in a basket. A basket option is similar to an index option, where a number of stocks have been grouped together in an index and the option is based on the price of the index, but differs in that the members and weightings of an index can change over time while those in a basket option do not.
Chi-fu Huang is a private investor, a retired hedge fund manager, and a former finance academic. He has made contributions to the theory of financial economics, writing on dynamic general equilibrium theory, intertemporal utility theory, and the theory of individual consumption and portfolio decisions.
Peter Jaeckel is a mathematician, and finance academic and practitioner. He is the Managing Director of OTC Analytics. He also teaches at the Certificate of Quantitative Finance programme and at Oxford University. Previously, he was a Managing Director at VTB Europe (Frankfurt)/VTB Capital (London). Before that, Global Head of Credit, Hybrid, Inflation, and Commodity Derivative Analytics at ABN Amro, and also held positions at Nikko Securities, NatWest, and Commerzbank Securities' product development group. He is the author of the bestselling Monte Carlo methods in finance. In mathematics, he has made important contributions in the field of Sobol sequences; in Mathematical Finance, he has been influential in the development of Monte Carlo methods in finance, and has also contributed, i.a., to the LIBOR market model, and to volatility modelling. Jäckel received his D. Phil. in Physics from Oxford University in 1995.
Quantitative analysis is the use of mathematical and statistical methods in finance and investment management. Those working in the field are quantitative analysts (quants). Quants tend to specialize in specific areas which may include derivative structuring or pricing, risk management, investment management and other related finance occupations. The occupation is similar to those in industrial mathematics in other industries. The process usually consists of searching vast databases for patterns, such as correlations among liquid assets or price-movement patterns.
The Tepper School of Business is the business school of Carnegie Mellon University. It is located in the university's 140-acre (0.57 km2) campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Riccardo Rebonato is Professor of Finance at EDHEC Business School and EDHEC-Risk Institute, Scientific Director of the EDHEC Risk Climate Impact Institute (ERCII), and author of journal articles and books on Mathematical Finance, covering derivatives pricing, risk management, asset allocation and climate change. Prior to this, he was Global Head of Rates and FX Analytics at PIMCO.
Pricing Partners, founded in 2005, is a Thomson Reuters company that is both a financial software editor and a valuation service company. It is headquartered in Paris with offices in Paris, London and Hong Kong. The company provides pricing models, analytics and independent valuation for the financial services market. The company has been identified by Microsoft France as one of the promising French startups that uses Microsoft technologies for its software development. The coverage of its financial library is on all major asset classes. This encompasses derivatives on asset classes like interest rates, credit, equity, inflation, foreign exchange, commodity, life insurance and hybrids. Since 2012, it also provides independent calculation and valuation on proprietary algorithmic indexes.
Marco Avellaneda (Ph.D.) was an American mathematician and financial consultant. Most recently he was the director of the Division of Financial Mathematics at the Courant Institute at New York University.
Zvi Wiener is a Professor of Finance and the former dean of the Hebrew University Business School Business administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
