Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Theory of Financial Risk and Derivative Pricing : From Statistical Physics to Risk Management by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Marc Potters ISBN: 0-521-81916-4 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 11 December, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $70.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Fat tails and more
Comment: This text has a nice discussion of Levy distributions and (important!) discusses why the central limit theorem does not apply to the tails of a distribution in the limit of many independent random events. An exponential distribution is given as an example how the CLT fails. I was first happy to see a chapter devoted to portfolio selection, but the chapter (like most of the book) is very difficult to follow (I gave up on that chapter, unhappily, because it looked interesting). The notation could have been better (to be quite honest, the notation is horrible), and the arguments (many of which are original) could have been made sharper and clearer. For my taste, too many arguments in the text rely on uncontrolled approximations, with Gaussian results as special limiting cases. The chapters on options are original, introducing their idea of history-dependent strategies (however, to get a strategy other than the delta-hedge does not not require history-dependence, CAPM is an example), but the predictions too often go in the direction of showing how Gaussian returns can be retrieved in some limit (I find this the opposite of convincing!). For an introduction to options, the 1973 Black-Scholes paper is still the best (aside from the wrong claim that CAPM and the delta-hedge yield the same results). The argument in the introduction in favor of 'randomness' as the origin of macroscopic law left me as cold as a cucumber. On page 4 a density is called 'invariant' under change of variable whereas 'scalar' is the correct word (a common error in many texts on relativity). The explanation of Ito calculus is inventive but inadequate (see instead Baxter and Rennie for a correct and readable treatment, one the forms the basis for new research on local volatility). Also, utlility is once mentioned but never criticized. Had the book been more pedagogically written then one could well have used it as an introductory text, given the nice choice of topics discussed.
Rating: 5
Summary: Reply to the previous reviewer
Comment: Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the previous reviewer prefered to remain anonymous. Otherwise, we would happily have argued with him privately. But his review contains so many erroneous and obnoxious statements that we feel we have to reply publicly, at least on the most important points.
a) After spending a full chapter (2) on empirical data and faithful models to describe them, we only price options using...the Brownian motion, says our reviewer (not even the Black-Scholes model, adds he). Well, either the reviewer has only casually browsed through our book, or this is total bad faith and disinformation. After discussing a general option pricing formula, we indeed illustrate it first (4.3.3) with the Black-Scholes model, then with Bachelier's (Brownian) model which, as we explain, is actually a better model for short term options. But the rest of the chapter is entirely devoted to non-Gaussian effects: a theory of the smile, its relation with kurtosis and long-ranged correlation in the volatility, and comparison with actual market smiles (4.3.4), and more importantly, the hedging strategies and residual risk (4.4), alternative hedging strategies for Value-at-Risk control (4.4.6), etc. The emphasis on risk, absent in the Black-Scholes world, is our main message, and partly justifies the title of our book.
b) "There is no statistical physics" in our book, moans the reviewer. Our aim was not to draw phoney analogies, but to present this field in the spirit of statistical physics, with what we feel is an interesting balance between intuition and rigour. (Many physicists feel stranded when reading standard mathematical finance books, where data is scarce, and rigour hides the inadequacies of the models). However, there are several genuine inputs from statistical physics, e.g. data processing, approximations, simple agent based models (2.8-9), functional derivatives to obtain optimal hedges (4.4), saddle point estimates of the Value at Risk for complex portfolios (5.4) and finally, Random Matrices that the reviewer finds unduly complex -- perhaps only because new to him. However, this is contained in "starred" section, indicating that it can be skipped at first reading, as many more advanced sections.
Two more details. We indeed sometimes consider independent random variables, sometimes only uncorrelated, hopefully not confusing the two. If the reviewer spotted incorrect statements, we would be grateful to him if we can correct them in further editions. Second, our book is not meant to provide ready to implement recipes but to present a different way of thinking about finance. Nevertheless, many of the ideas have already been implemented and are used by several (open minded?) financial institutions.
Rating: 2
Summary: Can do more harm than good
Comment: This book is a supposedly new approach to financial modeling from the viewpoint of "statistical physics". In fact, it is far from being that. First, there is little or no content really related to statistical physics in it. Apart from the fact that random variables and stochastic processes are also used in physics, the only feature in common between statistical physics and this book is some notational similarities and a lack of rigour which, justified in the case where it is supplemented by physical intuition, leads here to numerous mistakes and sloppy reasoning.
The title, while promising, is quite arrogant: not only there is no "theory of financial risks" in the book but many of the main issues of risk management are not even mentioned: Value at Risk receives less than a page at the end, while hedging of exotic options is not even an issue.
Also, while the first part of the book insists on choosing the correct distribution for price returns, the chapter on options exclusively gives computations for the case of ...Brownian motion (not even exponential Brownian motion)! One is left wondering whether these fancy models presented in the first part were worth mentioning?
Another point is the readership of this book: given the notational complexity of the book and the analogies with physics, only a PhD in theoretical physics can possibly find this book readable. In fact, a finance student will find it too light on the finance side while a math-minded student will find it too sloppy and imprecise.
The surprisingly low level of mathematical rigour - one confuses regularly "uncorrelated" with "independence"- is nevertheless accompanied by an incredibly sophisticated set of tools such as random matrix theory, which are exotic even for professional researchers. Perhaps it would be better to spend more time explaining the concept of stochastic volatility or nonstationarity than rocketing the reader into unknown grounds...
I come to the conclusion that the aim of the book is more to impress the reader about the technical sophistication of the authors than to teach anything in a clear manner.
Although OK as a bedtime reader, this book certainly does not contain anything one can practically implement: in fact the presentation is so imprecise that one is lost in the successive and uncontroled approximations, not knowing at the end what is the algorithm proposed to solve a given problem.
 |
Title: An Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance by Rosario N. Mantegna, H. Eugene Stanley ISBN: 0521620082 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
 |
Title: The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets (Texts and Monographs in Physics) by Johannes Voit ISBN: 3540009787 Publisher: Springer-Verlag Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
 |
Title: Why Stock Markets Crash : Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems by Didier Sornette ISBN: 0691096309 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 18 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
 |
Title: The Stock Market and Finance From a Physicist's Viewpoint by M. F. Osborne ISBN: 0964629208 Publisher: Crossgar Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
 |
Title: The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance (Mathematics, Finance and Risk) by Mark S. Joshi, Mark Broadie, Sam Howison, Neil Johnson, George Papanicolaou ISBN: 0521823552 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 24 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
