This book provides an innovative, integrated, and methodical approach to understanding complex financial models, integrating topics usually presented separately into a comprehensive whole. The book brings together financial models and high-level mathematics, reviewing the mathematical background necessary for understanding these models organically and in context. It begins with underlying assumptions and progresses logically through increasingly complex models to operative conclusions. Readers who have mastered the material will gain the tools needed to put theory into practice and incorporate financial models into real-life investment, financial, and business scenarios. Modern finance’s most bothersome shortcoming is that the two basic models for building an optimal investment portfolio, Markowitz’s mean-variance model and Sharpe and Treynor’s Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), fall short when we try to apply them using Excel Solver. This book explores these two models in detail, and for the first time in a textbook the Black-Litterman model for building an optimal portfolio constructed from a small number of assets (developed at Goldman Sachs) is thoroughly presented. The model’s integration of personal views and its application using Excel templates are demonstrated. The book also offers innovative presentations of the Modigliani–Miller model and the Consumption-Based Capital Asset Pricing Model (CCAPM). Problems at the end of each chapter invite the reader to put the models into immediate use. Fundamental Models in Financial Theory is suitable for classroom use or as a reference for finance practitioners.

Understanding and applying complex modern financial models in real life scenarios, including the Black-Litterman model for constructing an optimal portfolio while incorporating personal views.

An introduction to economic applications of the theory of continuous-time finance that strikes a balance between mathematical rigor and economic interpretation of financial market regularities. This book introduces the economic applications of the theory of continuous-time finance, with the goal of enabling the construction of realistic models, particularly those involving incomplete markets. Indeed, most recent applications of continuous-time finance aim to capture the imperfections and dysfunctions of financial markets—characteristics that became especially apparent during the market turmoil that started in 2008. The book begins by using discrete time to illustrate the basic mechanisms and introduce such notions as completeness, redundant pricing, and no arbitrage. It develops the continuous-time analog of those mechanisms and introduces the powerful tools of stochastic calculus. Going beyond other textbooks, the book then focuses on the study of markets in which some form of incompleteness, volatility, heterogeneity, friction, or behavioral subtlety arises. After presenting solutions methods for control problems and related partial differential equations, the text examines portfolio optimization and equilibrium in incomplete markets, interest rate and fixed-income modeling, and stochastic volatility. Finally, it presents models where investors form different beliefs or suffer frictions, form habits, or have recursive utilities, studying the effects not only on optimal portfolio choices but also on equilibrium, or the price of primitive securities. The book strikes a balance between mathematical rigor and the need for economic interpretation of financial market regularities, although with an emphasis on the latter.

This classic textbook in the field, now completely revised and updated, provides a bridge between theory and practice. Appropriate for the second course in Finance for MBA students and the first course in Finance for doctoral students, the text prepares students for the complex world of modern financial scholarship and practice. It presents a unified treatment of finance combining theory, empirical evidence and applications.

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities. MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream—chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of "wild" randomness. MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America's financial markets have grown into their current form.

This work, now in a thoroughly revised second edition, presents the economic foundations of financial markets theory from a mathematically rigorous standpoint and offers a self-contained critical discussion based on empirical results. It is the only textbook on the subject to include more than two hundred exercises, with detailed solutions to selected exercises. Financial Markets Theory covers classical asset pricing theory in great detail, including utility theory, equilibrium theory, portfolio selection, mean-variance portfolio theory, CAPM, CCAPM, APT, and the Modigliani-Miller theorem. Starting from an analysis of the empirical evidence on the theory, the authors provide a discussion of the relevant literature, pointing out the main advances in classical asset pricing theory and the new approaches designed to address asset pricing puzzles and open problems (e.g., behavioral finance). Later chapters in the book contain more advanced material, including on the role of information in financial markets, non-classical preferences, noise traders and market microstructure. This textbook is aimed at graduate students in mathematical finance and financial economics, but also serves as a useful reference for practitioners working in insurance, banking, investment funds and financial consultancy. Introducing necessary tools from microeconomic theory, this book is highly accessible and completely self-contained. Advance praise for the second edition: "Financial Markets Theory is comprehensive, rigorous, and yet highly accessible. With their second edition, Barucci and Fontana have set an even higher standard!"Darrell Duffie, Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University "This comprehensive book is a great self-contained source for studying most major theoretical aspects of financial economics. What makes the book particularly useful is that it provides a lot of intuition, detailed discussions of empirical implications, a very thorough survey of the related literature, and many completely solved exercises. The second edition covers more ground and provides many more proofs, and it will be a handy addition to the library of every student or researcher in the field."Jaksa Cvitanic, Richard N. Merkin Professor of Mathematical Finance, Caltech "The second edition of Financial Markets Theory by Barucci and Fontana is a superb achievement that knits together all aspects of modern finance theory, including financial markets microstructure, in a consistent and self-contained framework. Many exercises, together with their detailed solutions, make this book indispensable for serious students in finance."Michel Crouhy, Head of Research and Development, NATIXIS

This handbook in two parts covers key topics of the theory of financial decision making. Some of the papers discuss real applications or case studies as well. There are a number of new papers that have never been published before especially in Part II.Part I is concerned with Decision Making Under Uncertainty. This includes subsections on Arbitrage, Utility Theory, Risk Aversion and Static Portfolio Theory, and Stochastic Dominance. Part II is concerned with Dynamic Modeling that is the transition for static decision making to multiperiod decision making. The analysis starts with Risk Measures and then discusses Dynamic Portfolio Theory, Tactical Asset Allocation and Asset-Liability Management Using Utility and Goal Based Consumption-Investment Decision Models.A comprehensive set of problems both computational and review and mind expanding with many unsolved problems are in an accompanying problems book. The handbook plus the book of problems form a very strong set of materials for PhD and Masters courses both as the main or as supplementary text in finance theory, financial decision making and portfolio theory. For researchers, it is a valuable resource being an up to date treatment of topics in the classic books on these topics by Johnathan Ingersoll in 1988, and William Ziemba and Raymond Vickson in 1975 (updated 2 nd edition published in 2006).

Readership: Undergraduates and researchers in probability and statistics; applied, pure and financial mathematics; economics; chaos.

Illustrates how R may be used successfully to solve problems in quantitative finance Applied Probabilistic Calculus for Financial Engineering: An Introduction Using R provides R recipes for asset allocation and portfolio optimization problems. It begins by introducing all the necessary probabilistic and statistical foundations, before moving on to topics related to asset allocation and portfolio optimization with R codes illustrated for various examples. This clear and concise book covers financial engineering, using R in data analysis, and univariate, bivariate, and multivariate data analysis. It examines probabilistic calculus for modeling financial engineering—walking the reader through building an effective financial model from the Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) Model via probabilistic calculus, while also covering Ito Calculus. Classical mathematical models in financial engineering and modern portfolio theory are discussed—along with the Two Mutual Fund Theorem and The Sharpe Ratio. The book also looks at R as a calculator and using R in data analysis in financial engineering. Additionally, it covers asset allocation using R, financial risk modeling and portfolio optimization using R, global and local optimal values, locating functional maxima and minima, and portfolio optimization by performance analytics in CRAN. Covers optimization methodologies in probabilistic calculus for financial engineering Answers the question: What does a "Random Walk" Financial Theory look like? Covers the GBM Model and the Random Walk Model Examines modern theories of portfolio optimization, including The Markowitz Model of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), The Black-Litterman Model, and The Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model Applied Probabilistic Calculus for Financial Engineering: An Introduction Using R s an ideal reference for professionals and students in economics, econometrics, and finance, as well as for financial investment quants and financial engineers.