Principles of Financial Engineering

Presents a fresh introduction to financial engineering. This book offers links between intuition and underlying mathematics and a mixture of market insights and mathematical materials. It also includes end-of-chapter exercises and case studies. Bestselling author Salih Neftci presents a fresh, original, informative, and up-to-date introduction to financial engineering. The book offers clear links between intuition and underlying mathematics and an outstanding mixture of market insights and mathematical materials. Also included are end-of-chapter exercises and case studies. In a market characterized by the existence of large pools of liquid funds willing to go anywhere, anytime in search of a few points of advantage, there are new risks. Lacking experience with these new risks, firms, governmental entities, and other investors have been surprised by unexpected and often disastrous financial losses. Managers and analysts seeking to employ these new instruments and strategies to make pricing, hedging, trading, and portfolio management decisions require a mature understanding of theoretical finance and sophisticated mathematical and computer modeling skills. Important and useful because it analyzes financial assets and derivatives from the financial engineering perspective, this book offers a different approach than the existing finance literature in financial asset and derivative analysis. Seeking not to introduce financial instruments but instead to describe the methods of synthetically creating assets in static and in dynamic environments and to show how to use them, his book complements all currently available textbooks. It emphasizes developing methods that can be used in order to solve risk management, taxation, regulation, and above all, pricing problems. This perspective forms the basis of practical risk management. It will be useful for anyone learning about practical elements of financial engineering. Exercises and case studies at end of each chapter and on-line Solutions Manual are provided. It explains issues involved in day-to-day life of traders, using language other than mathematics. It offers careful and concise analysis of the LIBOR market model and of volatility engineering problems.