Financial Derivatives in Theory and Practice [Hardcover]

P. J. Hunt (Author), J. E. Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471967173 | ISBN-13: 978-0471967170 | Publication Date: May 12, 2000

This book brings together in one volume both a complete, rigorous and yet readable account of the mathematics underlying derivative pricing and a guide to applying these ideas to solve real pricing problems. It is aimed at practitioners and researchers who wish to understand the latest finance literature and develop their own pricing models. The authors' combination of strong theoretical knowledge and extensive market experience make this book particularly relevant for those interested in real world applications of mathematical finance.

Features:

• detailed coverage of interest rate derivatives, from 'vanilla' instruments through to many of the more exotic products currently being traded

• overview of popular term structure models along with their relationships to each other (including Heath-Jarrow-Morton, short rate models and the latest market models)

• explanation of numeraires as a modelling and pricing tool

• pricing models for constant maturity swaps and other convexity products

• models and efficient algorithms for path-dependent and Bermudan swaptions

• insights into how to go about pricing products beyond those treated in the text

• accessible yet rigorous treatment of the stochastic calculus required for option pricing

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This one adopts the mathematics text style of approach...But, it is not a dry book...The book is deep and detailed..." (Short Book Reviews, Vol. 20, No. 3, December 2000)

"...It sets a new high standard for future texts on mathematical finance..." (The Statistician, Vol.51, No.2, 2002)

From the Inside Flap

"A masterful work which explains clearly and precisely the mathematics and the practicalities of derivative pricing. Written by two leading experts from academia and industry, this is a rigorous description of the cutting edge of both research and practice. The excellent in-depth coverage of the interest-rate markets includes the application of basic theory coupled with descriptions of real-world products, convexity effects, and state of the art modelling. A very valuable book, which is destined to be a key reference for bankers and researchers" Martin Baxter, Nomura International, London, UK (co-author of the best-selling Financial Calculus) "This work strikes an excellent balance between theory and applications, between rigor and accessibility. The early chapters develop mathematical tools lucidly and with a clear focus on the important issues. Later chapters apply these tools to a broad range of problems and models in mathematical finance. The book is rich in links between theory and industry practice, and covers many topics not easily found elsewhere. It is a valuable and authoritative resource for both students and experts." Paul Glasserman, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, USA "This book achieves two main goals. First, it provides an excellent and highly comprehensive account of martingale theory and Itô’s stochastic calculus, which underpin arbitrage pricing theory. Secondly, it offers a thorough analysis of the fundamental ideas of modern financial modelling, with special emphasis on the concepts related to the valuation and hedging of interest-rate sensitive derivatives. The exceptional strength of the book lies in the fact that the authors never lose their perspective on the practical aspects of the theory. Hunt and Kennedy, who are themselves renowned experts in this area, have set a new high standard for future texts on term structure modelling." Marek Rutkowski, Financial Mathematics Centre, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland Contents Part I: Theory

1. Single-period option pricing
2. Brownian motion
3. Martingales
4. Stochastic integration
5. Girsanov and martingale representation
6. Stochastic differential equations
7. Option pricing in continuous time
8. Dynamic term structure models

Part II: Practice

1. Modelling in practice
2. Basic instruments and terminology
3. Pricing standard market derivatives
4. Futures contracts Orientation: Pricing exotic European derivatives
5. Terminal swap-rate models
6. Convexity corrections
7. Implied interest rate pricing models
8. Multi-currency terminal swap-rate models Orientation: Pricing exotic American and path-dependent derivatives
9. Short-rate models
10. Market models
11. Markov-functional modelling

Appendices

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (May 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471967173
• ISBN-13: 978-0471967170
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,034,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars well written and relevant, June 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Financial Derivatives in Theory and Practice (Hardcover)

The book "Financial Derivatives in Theory and Practice" by P.J. Hunt and J.E. Kennedy is yet another textbook on modern mathematics of finance. Although the market seems to be saturated by countless texts on the subject, this book appears to be an original and valuable contribution to the current literature.

The book is divided into two parts: Theory (212 pages) and Practice (159 pages). The first part surveys the mathematics of no-arbitrage pricing theory. It starts by a succinct and rigorous account on stochastic calculus (including basic properties on Wiener process, theory of martingales, and a complete development of stochastic integration w.r.t. continuous semimartingales), written in the spirit of the monograph by Revuz and Yor. The section on SDEs is particularly detailed and covers many topics (e.g. strong and weak solutions, description of the Yamada-Watanabe construction) that are not typically found in texts on finance. All technicalities are treated with due care, and some parts of the text are accompanied with exercises. The first part concludes with two sections on pricing by no-arbitrage and term structure models. Overall this part of the book is masterfully written and it is certain to please a mathematically-inclined reader (I'm not sure about the others).

The second part deals with application of the theory in pricing, with emphasis on interest-rate derivatives. After starting off with an interesting discussion about the real-world modelling issues (risk-free vs. "real-world" probability measure, calibration and dimension reduction), the authors introduce basic fixed income instruments (FRAs, caps, floors, swaps, etc) and proceed by developing no-arbitrage pricing using the standard Black's formula. The next four sections containing material on pricing exotic European derivatives largely follow authors' previously published papers. The book concludes with several sections on pricing exotics and path-dependent derivatives that start with a nice accounts on short-rate (Vasicek-Hull-White) model and market models. The treatment of the latter also gives a systematic development of the drift correction factors for various choices of numeraires. The last section on Markov functional modelling follows one of the authors' papers. One detail that is obviously missing from this part is the treatment of hedging of interest-rate derivatives. Also additional comparisons between existing and the Markov functional model seem to be in order.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Yet another textbook on mathematical finance, July 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Financial Derivatives in Theory and Practice (Hardcover)

This volume is yet another textbook on mathematical finance (a branch of mathematics, as opposed to quantitative finance/ financial engineering) and does not contain much original material except a good exposition of LIBOR and swap market models in the second part.

The book is divided into two parts, Theory and Pratice.
The theory part is a course on stochastic processes and stochastic integration: martingales, local martingales, semimartingales, Ito integrals and Ito formulas are developed with a high level of mathematical rigor. This part is definitely not accessible to a non mathematician. On the other hand it does not contain anything new and most proofs are not given...

The second part is about applications to finance, but it is focused on interest rate models, which seems to be the expertise of the authors. LIBOR and swap market models and interest rate derivatives are explained in detail but only at a theoretical level; the subtitles on "calibration" do not contain any useful material not is there a single numerical or empirical example of market data/ model calibration. Monte Carlo simulation, finite difference methods and tree methods are not even discussed...

The relation between the two parts is not clear: it seems that one author wrote the first part while the author wrote the second part...for example, the first part takes great care to distinguish predictable and optional processes and to define integrals of predictable processes while the second part only uses continuous models for which this distinction is useless.
Also, the first part develops the Kunita Watanabe decomposition and studies sets of martingale measure and their extremal elements, a prelude to the study of incomplete markets.
These tools are not put to use in the second part.

It could be a good reading for graduate students in probability curious to know about mathematical finance but not to professionals in this field.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Erroneous comments below, March 9, 2005

By 

LB (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Financial Derivatives in Theory and Practice (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics) (Paperback)

I don't know why the previous reviewer said the book contains no mathematical proofs, but this statement is completely false. I have the book in front of me here, and it looks like all the theorems are accompanied with complete proofs. I don't mean to provide a complete review here, but the contents looks good, and so does the choice of topics. It certainly deserves more than 2 stars. While the level of mathematical sophistication is not that of Karatzas & Shreeve's, it is certainly above the level of a lot of prople in finance except those with a mathematical background. For a simpler book you may want to read Hull or something else (you have about 500,000 other books to choose from, isn't that great?)