Sometimes, MATLAB seems to be slow and inefficient. MATLAB is great for prototyping and interactive analysis, but sometimes execution speed is crucial. The MathWorks proposes to vectorized your code. Recently, I found that this is not always the best solution for higher speed. A better solution comes from the sparsely documented JIT Compiler which was already introduced […]
On July 1st, 1988 German DAX was published. It was not only an index of the German stock market: It introduced a new methodology computing a stock market index. The German DAX was the first popular index to include weights according to market capitalization and calculating returns including dividends. Now, after 25 years it is […]
Often you find studies how well a specific fund or trading strategy has performed. You must be aware of the fact that basically all studies based on historical data lie – or at least do not tell the full story. There are two highly underestimated effects: Survivor bias and fat tails. Both effects make poor […]
After benchmarking the GPU performance of Accelereyes Jacket and Matlab PCT, I found that Jacket pushes the limit to best performance much harder than PCT. Now, according to the Accelereyes Blog, The MathWorks took over Jacket. New Jacket licenses are not available any more. Consequently, for a moment, the only available options left for GPU […]
Model risk is the risk that the market models in investment banking do not properly reflect the reality. This risk is often neglected or simply ignored. But, it is one of the most important risks as we could see in the mispricing of CDO, ABS, MBS etc at the beginning of the financial crisis (early […]
In my last benchmark of the MATLAB GPU toolboxes, I compared PCT from The MathWorks, Jacket from Accelereyes and GPUMat from GPYou. I now updated theses results with new hardware and new some more optimized code. Previously, we used a GeForce GTX 275. Now, we also use the GeForce GTX 520 Ti. On this hardware, […]
More and more investors insist on guarantees on the investments. Theses investments are often created using options or dynamic strategies like CPPI. Recently, these strategies were made available in secularized form: Leveraged Exchange Traded Funds (LETF) and Exchange Traded Notes (ETN). Also, life insurance instruments often include guarantees on funds like Variable Annuities. In this […]
Before using specialized tools for back-testing I propose that one tries the MS Excel Pivot Table first. The pivot table tool is great for inspection, filtering and analyzing large data sets. In this article, I will present how to create a simple timing-based strategy and how to compute its historical performance.
Sell in May and go away is an old wisdom which is interesting to analyze. And the continuation “Remember to come back in September” completes this wisdom to a real trading strategy. This strategy is quite old. Many sources say that the original saying comes from traders in the City of London and was “Sell in May […]
In the last decade, gold constantly rose in value. In this post, we will use public data to look into the value relationship of gold and money. Value of gold measured in different currencies Gold is definitely one of the oldest currencies. Until 1971, USD and gold were essentially the same using a fixed conversion rate. […]
The Cost of Redundancy Expensive resources spent on computer grids are often wasted. An example from the financial industry teaches how repeated and redundant calculations can eat up all the computing power. Theta Proxy, a simple and yet generic solution, has the potential to save millions in server costs. Nowadays much of the computation time […]
Computer Aided Finance - Money and Math 