Download or read book Keeping Up with the Quants written by Thomas H. Davenport and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Everyone Needs Analytical Skills Welcome to the age of data. No matter your interests (sports, movies, politics), your industry (finance, marketing, technology, manufacturing), or the type of organization you work for (big company, nonprofit, small start-up)—your world is awash with data. As a successful manager today, you must be able to make sense of all this information. You need to be conversant with analytical terminology and methods and able to work with quantitative information. This book promises to become your “quantitative literacy" guide—helping you develop the analytical skills you need right now in order to summarize data, find the meaning in it, and extract its value. In Keeping Up with the Quants, authors, professors, and analytics experts Thomas Davenport and Jinho Kim offer practical tools to improve your understanding of data analytics and enhance your thinking and decision making. You’ll gain crucial skills, including: • How to formulate a hypothesis • How to gather and analyze relevant data • How to interpret and communicate analytical results • How to develop habits of quantitative thinking • How to deal effectively with the “quants” in your organization Big data and the analytics based on it promise to change virtually every industry and business function over the next decade. If you don’t have a business degree or if you aren’t comfortable with statistics and quantitative methods, this book is for you. Keeping Up with the Quants will give you the skills you need to master this new challenge—and gain a significant competitive edge.
Download or read book The Quants written by Scott Patterson and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris, and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future. In March of 2006, four of the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking billions. On that night, these four men and their cohorts were the new kings of Wall Street. Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants. Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz--technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers--had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino. The quants helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse. Few realized, though, that in creating this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster. Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside story of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of their net worth vaporize--and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so fast.
Download or read book Big Data at Work written by Thomas Davenport and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Go ahead, be skeptical about big data. The author was—at first. When the term “big data” first came on the scene, bestselling author Tom Davenport (Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work) thought it was just another example of technology hype. But his research in the years that followed changed his mind. Now, in clear, conversational language, Davenport explains what big data means—and why everyone in business needs to know about it. Big Data at Work covers all the bases: what big data means from a technical, consumer, and management perspective; what its opportunities and costs are; where it can have real business impact; and which aspects of this hot topic have been oversold. This book will help you understand: • Why big data is important to you and your organization • What technology you need to manage it • How big data could change your job, your company, and your industry • How to hire, rent, or develop the kinds of people who make big data work • The key success factors in implementing any big data project • How big data is leading to a new approach to managing analytics With dozens of company examples, including UPS, GE, Amazon, United Healthcare, Citigroup, and many others, this book will help you seize all opportunities—from improving decisions, products, and services to strengthening customer relationships. It will show you how to put big data to work in your own organization so that you too can harness the power of this ever-evolving new resource.
Download or read book The Quants written by Scott Patterson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You're a genius. Nobody plays the financial markets better than you. What could possibly go wrong? Quants - quantitative analysts - were the maths masterminds let loose on Wall Street in the belief that their brilliant, impregnable computer programs would always beat the market. But as the catastrophic events of 2007 and 2008 showed, their seemingly failproof methods were little more than ticking timebombs. Inspired by the 'Godfather of Quants' - maths-professor-turned-gambler Ed Thorp, who began applying skills learned at the Vegas tables to the financial markets back in the 1950s - the quants achieved extraordinary success and massive wealth. This book charts their rise from obscurity to boom and then to bust, explaining why they were so confident - and how they got it so disastrously wrong.
Download or read book Analytics at Work written by Thomas H. Davenport and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a follow-up to the successful Competing on Analytics, authors Tom Davenport, Jeanne Harris, and Robert Morison provide practical frameworks and tools for all companies that want to use analytics as a basis for more effective and more profitable decision making. Regardless of your company's strategy, and whether or not analytics are your company's primary source of competitive differentiation, this book is designed to help you assess your organization's analytical capabilities, provide the tools to build these capabilities, and put analytics to work. The book helps you answer these pressing questions: What assets do I need in place in my organization in order to use analytics to run my business? Once I have these assets, how do I deploy them to get the most from an analytic approach? How do I get an analytic initiative off the ground in the first place, and then how do I sustain analytics in my organization over time? Packed with tools, frameworks, and all new examples, Analytics at Work makes analytics understandable and accessible and teaches you how to make your company more analytical.
Download or read book My Life as a Quant written by Emanuel Derman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-01-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In My Life as a Quant, Emanuel Derman relives his exciting journey as one of the first high-energy particle physicists to migrate to Wall Street. Page by page, Derman details his adventures in this field—analyzing the incompatible personas of traders and quants, and discussing the dissimilar nature of knowledge in physics and finance. Throughout this tale, he also reflects on the appropriate way to apply the refined methods of physics to the hurly-burly world of markets.
Download or read book HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers HBR Guide Series written by Harvard Business Review and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don't let a fear of numbers hold you back. Today's business environment brings with it an onslaught of data. Now more than ever, managers must know how to tease insight from data--to understand where the numbers come from, make sense of them, and use them to inform tough decisions. How do you get started? Whether you're working with data experts or running your own tests, you'll find answers in the HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers. This book describes three key steps in the data analysis process, so you can get the information you need, study the data, and communicate your findings to others. You'll learn how to: Identify the metrics you need to measure Run experiments and A/B tests Ask the right questions of your data experts Understand statistical terms and concepts Create effective charts and visualizations Avoid common mistakes
Download or read book How I Became a Quant written by Richard R. Lindsey and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for How I Became a Quant "Led by two top-notch quants, Richard R. Lindsey and Barry Schachter, How I Became a Quant details the quirky world of quantitative analysis through stories told by some of today's most successful quants. For anyone who might have thought otherwise, there are engaging personalities behind all that number crunching!" --Ira Kawaller, Kawaller & Co. and the Kawaller Fund "A fun and fascinating read. This book tells the story of how academics, physicists, mathematicians, and other scientists became professional investors managing billions." --David A. Krell, President and CEO, International Securities Exchange "How I Became a Quant should be must reading for all students with a quantitative aptitude. It provides fascinating examples of the dynamic career opportunities potentially open to anyone with the skills and passion for quantitative analysis." --Roy D. Henriksson, Chief Investment Officer, Advanced Portfolio Management "Quants"--those who design and implement mathematical models for the pricing of derivatives, assessment of risk, or prediction of market movements--are the backbone of today's investment industry. As the greater volatility of current financial markets has driven investors to seek shelter from increasing uncertainty, the quant revolution has given people the opportunity to avoid unwanted financial risk by literally trading it away, or more specifically, paying someone else to take on the unwanted risk. How I Became a Quant reveals the faces behind the quant revolution, offering you?the?chance to learn firsthand what it's like to be a?quant today. In this fascinating collection of Wall Street war stories, more than two dozen quants detail their roots, roles, and contributions, explaining what they do and how they do it, as well as outlining the sometimes unexpected paths they have followed from the halls of academia to the front lines of an investment revolution.
Download or read book Competing on Analytics written by Thomas H. Davenport and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2007-03-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You have more information at hand about your business environment than ever before. But are you using it to “out-think” your rivals? If not, you may be missing out on a potent competitive tool. In Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris argue that the frontier for using data to make decisions has shifted dramatically. Certain high-performing enterprises are now building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights that in turn generate impressive business results. Their secret weapon? Analytics: sophisticated quantitative and statistical analysis and predictive modeling. Exemplars of analytics are using new tools to identify their most profitable customers and offer them the right price, to accelerate product innovation, to optimize supply chains, and to identify the true drivers of financial performance. A wealth of examples—from organizations as diverse as Amazon, Barclay’s, Capital One, Harrah’s, Procter & Gamble, Wachovia, and the Boston Red Sox—illuminate how to leverage the power of analytics.
Download or read book The Man Who Solved the Market written by Gregory Zuckerman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award The unbelievable story of a secretive mathematician who pioneered the era of the algorithm--and made $23 billion doing it. Jim Simons is the greatest money maker in modern financial history. No other investor--Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Ray Dalio, Steve Cohen, or George Soros--can touch his record. Since 1988, Renaissance's signature Medallion fund has generated average annual returns of 66 percent. The firm has earned profits of more than $100 billion; Simons is worth twenty-three billion dollars. Drawing on unprecedented access to Simons and dozens of current and former employees, Zuckerman, a veteran Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, tells the gripping story of how a world-class mathematician and former code breaker mastered the market. Simons pioneered a data-driven, algorithmic approach that's sweeping the world. As Renaissance became a market force, its executives began influencing the world beyond finance. Simons became a major figure in scientific research, education, and liberal politics. Senior executive Robert Mercer is more responsible than anyone else for the Trump presidency, placing Steve Bannon in the campaign and funding Trump's victorious 2016 effort. Mercer also impacted the campaign behind Brexit. The Man Who Solved the Market is a portrait of a modern-day Midas who remade markets in his own image, but failed to anticipate how his success would impact his firm and his country. It's also a story of what Simons's revolution means for the rest of us.
Download or read book Avoiding Data Pitfalls written by Ben Jones and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avoid data blunders and create truly useful visualizations Avoiding Data Pitfalls is a reputation-saving handbook for those who work with data, designed to help you avoid the all-too-common blunders that occur in data analysis, visualization, and presentation. Plenty of data tools exist, along with plenty of books that tell you how to use them—but unless you truly understand how to work with data, each of these tools can ultimately mislead and cause costly mistakes. This book walks you step by step through the full data visualization process, from calculation and analysis through accurate, useful presentation. Common blunders are explored in depth to show you how they arise, how they have become so common, and how you can avoid them from the outset. Then and only then can you take advantage of the wealth of tools that are out there—in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, the right tools can cut down on the time, labor, and myriad decisions that go into each and every data presentation. Workers in almost every industry are now commonly expected to effectively analyze and present data, even with little or no formal training. There are many pitfalls—some might say chasms—in the process, and no one wants to be the source of a data error that costs money or even lives. This book provides a full walk-through of the process to help you ensure a truly useful result. Delve into the "data-reality gap" that grows with our dependence on data Learn how the right tools can streamline the visualization process Avoid common mistakes in data analysis, visualization, and presentation Create and present clear, accurate, effective data visualizations To err is human, but in today's data-driven world, the stakes can be high and the mistakes costly. Don't rely on "catching" mistakes, avoid them from the outset with the expert instruction in Avoiding Data Pitfalls.
Download or read book Introduction to Stochastic Calculus with Applications written by Fima C. Klebaner and published by Imperial College Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a concise treatment of stochastic calculus and its applications. It gives a simple but rigorous treatment of the subject including a range of advanced topics, it is useful for practitioners who use advanced theoretical results. It covers advanced applications, such as models in mathematical finance, biology and engineering.Self-contained and unified in presentation, the book contains many solved examples and exercises. It may be used as a textbook by advanced undergraduates and graduate students in stochastic calculus and financial mathematics. It is also suitable for practitioners who wish to gain an understanding or working knowledge of the subject. For mathematicians, this book could be a first text on stochastic calculus; it is good companion to more advanced texts by a way of examples and exercises. For people from other fields, it provides a way to gain a working knowledge of stochastic calculus. It shows all readers the applications of stochastic calculus methods and takes readers to the technical level required in research and sophisticated modelling.This second edition contains a new chapter on bonds, interest rates and their options. New materials include more worked out examples in all chapters, best estimators, more results on change of time, change of measure, random measures, new results on exotic options, FX options, stochastic and implied volatility, models of the age-dependent branching process and the stochastic Lotka-Volterra model in biology, non-linear filtering in engineering and five new figures.Instructors can obtain slides of the text from the author.
Download or read book PreMBA Analytical Primer written by Regina Trevino and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-10-13 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a review of the analytical methods required in most of the quantitative courses taught at MBA programs. Students with no technical background, or who have not studied mathematics since college or even earlier, may easily feel overwhelmed by the mathematical formalism that is typical of economics and finance courses. These students will benefit from a concise and focused review of the analytical tools that will become a necessary skill in their MBA classes. The objective of this book is to present the essential quantitative concepts and methods in a self-contained, non-technical, and intuitive way.
Download or read book Dark Pools written by Scott Patterson and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A news-breaking account of the global stock market's subterranean battles, Dark Pools portrays the rise of the "bots"--artificially intelligent systems that execute trades in milliseconds and use the cover of darkness to out-maneuver the humans who've created them. In the beginning was Josh Levine, an idealistic programming genius who dreamed of wresting control of the market from the big exchanges that, again and again, gave the giant institutions an advantage over the little guy. Levine created a computerized trading hub named Island where small traders swapped stocks, and over time his invention morphed into a global electronic stock market that sent trillions in capital through a vast jungle of fiber-optic cables. By then, the market that Levine had sought to fix had turned upside down, birthing secretive exchanges called dark pools and a new species of trading machines that could think, and that seemed, ominously, to be slipping the control of their human masters. Dark Pools is the fascinating story of how global markets have been hijacked by trading robots--many so self-directed that humans can't predict what they'll do next.
Download or read book Quantitative Finance written by Matt Davison and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teach Your Students How to Become Successful Working Quants Quantitative Finance: A Simulation-Based Introduction Using Excel provides an introduction to financial mathematics for students in applied mathematics, financial engineering, actuarial science, and business administration. The text not only enables students to practice with the basic techniques of financial mathematics, but it also helps them gain significant intuition about what the techniques mean, how they work, and what happens when they stop working. After introducing risk, return, decision making under uncertainty, and traditional discounted cash flow project analysis, the book covers mortgages, bonds, and annuities using a blend of Excel simulation and difference equation or algebraic formalism. It then looks at how interest rate markets work and how to model bond prices before addressing mean variance portfolio optimization, the capital asset pricing model, options, and value at risk (VaR). The author next focuses on binomial model tools for pricing options and the analysis of discrete random walks. He also introduces stochastic calculus in a nonrigorous way and explains how to simulate geometric Brownian motion. The text proceeds to thoroughly discuss options pricing, mostly in continuous time. It concludes with chapters on stochastic models of the yield curve and incomplete markets using simple discrete models. Accessible to students with a relatively modest level of mathematical background, this book will guide your students in becoming successful quants. It uses both hand calculations and Excel spreadsheets to analyze plenty of examples from simple bond portfolios. The spreadsheets are available on the book’s CRC Press web page.
Download or read book Automated Trading with R written by Chris Conlan and published by Apress. This book was released on 2016-09-28 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn to trade algorithmically with your existing brokerage, from data management, to strategy optimization, to order execution, using free and publicly available data. Connect to your brokerage’s API, and the source code is plug-and-play. Automated Trading with R explains automated trading, starting with its mathematics and moving to its computation and execution. You will gain a unique insight into the mechanics and computational considerations taken in building a back-tester, strategy optimizer, and fully functional trading platform. The platform built in this book can serve as a complete replacement for commercially available platforms used by retail traders and small funds. Software components are strictly decoupled and easily scalable, providing opportunity to substitute any data source, trading algorithm, or brokerage. This book will: Provide a flexible alternative to common strategy automation frameworks, like Tradestation, Metatrader, and CQG, to small funds and retail traders Offer an understanding of the internal mechanisms of an automated trading system Standardize discussion and notation of real-world strategy optimization problems What You Will Learn Understand machine-learning criteria for statistical validity in the context of time-series Optimize strategies, generate real-time trading decisions, and minimize computation time while programming an automated strategy in R and using its package library Best simulate strategy performance in its specific use case to derive accurate performance estimates Understand critical real-world variables pertaining to portfolio management and performance assessment, including latency, drawdowns, varying trade size, portfolio growth, and penalization of unused capital Who This Book Is For Traders/practitioners at the retail or small fund level with at least an undergraduate background in finance or computer science; graduate level finance or data science students
Download or read book Quantitative Finance For Dummies written by Steve Bell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, thorough introduction to quantitative finance Does the complex world of quantitative finance make you quiver?You're not alone! It's a tough subject for even high-levelfinancial gurus to grasp, but Quantitative Finance ForDummies offers plain-English guidance on making sense ofapplying mathematics to investing decisions. With this completeguide, you'll gain a solid understanding of futures, options andrisk, and get up-to-speed on the most popular equations, methods,formulas and models (such as the Black-Scholes model) that areapplied in quantitative finance. Also known as mathematical finance, quantitative finance is thefield of mathematics applied to financial markets. It's a highlytechnical discipline—but almost all investment companies andhedge funds use quantitative methods. This fun and friendly guidebreaks the subject of quantitative finance down to easilydigestible parts, making it approachable for personal investors andfinance students alike. With the help of Quantitative FinanceFor Dummies, you'll learn the mathematical skills necessary forsuccess with quantitative finance, the most up-to-date portfolioand risk management applications and everything you need to knowabout basic derivatives pricing. Covers the core models, formulas and methods used inquantitative finance Includes examples and brief exercises to help augment yourunderstanding of QF Provides an easy-to-follow introduction to the complex world ofquantitative finance Explains how QF methods are used to define the current marketvalue of a derivative security Whether you're an aspiring quant or a top-tier personalinvestor, Quantitative Finance For Dummies is your go-toguide for coming to grips with QF/risk management.
