This book teaches financial engineering in an innovative way: by providing tools and a point of view to quickly and easily solve real front-office problems. Projects and simulations are not just exercises in this book, but its heart and soul. You will not only learn how to do state-of-the-art simulations and build exotic derivatives valuation models, you will also learn how to quickly make reasonable inferences based on incomplete information. This book will give you the expertise to make significant progress in understanding brand new derivatives given only a preliminary term sheet, thus making you extraordinarily valuable to banks, brokerage houses, trading floors, and hedge funds.
<i>Financial Hacking</i> is not about long, detailed mathematical proofs or brief summaries of conventional financial theories; it is about engineering specific, useable answers to imprecise but important questions. It is an essential book both for students and for practitioners of financial engineering.
MBAs in finance learn case-method and standard finance mainly by talking. Mathematical finance students learn the elegance and beauty of formulas mainly by manipulating symbols. But financial engineers need to learn how to build useful tools, and the best way to do that is to actually build them in a test environment, with only hypothetical profits or losses at stake. That's what this book does. It is like a trading desk sandbox that prepares graduate students or others looking to move closer to trading operations.<b>Key Features:</b> <ul> <li>One outstanding feature is a lack of source code. Wait ¡ª how can a lack of something be a feature? And specifically, how can a book about projects not include a CD or a website with the code in it? That seems crazy, but it's the very point of the book that financial engineers learn by doing, not by copy-and-pasting</li> <li>The reader will be exposed to different tools and programming languages, including Microsoft Excel, S-PLUS or R, Mathematica, Python, and others. Unlike other books that focus on a single tool, it is not the purpose of the book to teach any one language, but rather to show how to build projects in various standard tools of the trade. Indeed, it is not required or expected that readers know any of these languages or tools at all. The code snippets are intended to be essentially self-explanatory, though occasional tips and tricks do come in</li> <li>Examples and code snippets and projects permeate the book, and that means the book can be appreciated in two different ways. Think of it like a book on how to draw cartoons. You could just flip through the book, look at the pretty pictures, and come away with some tips you gleaned here or there. Or you can take the time to do the exercises along the way and truly master the craft</li>
