Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives (Hardcover)

by John C. Hull (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
featured in 5 of the best - Quality World November 2006 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description
For undergraduate and graduate courses in Options and Futures, Financial Engineering, and Risk Management, typically found in business, finance, economics and mathematics departments. This fifth edition text represents how academia and real-world practice have come together with a common respect and focus of theory and practice. It provides a unifying approach to the valuation of all derivatives. This popular course text is considered to be "the bible" by practitioners. The fifth edition has a total of seven new chapters. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 572 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 3rd, w/ disk edition (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0138874980
• ISBN-13: 978-0138874988
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,540,534 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

99 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good first step into the world of Quantitative Finance, May 6, 2005

By	Paul Thurston (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives (5th Edition) (Hardcover)

The author has written a nice, lively elementary text on mathematical finance. This book can serve as a excellent launching point into the topic. For the next step in the reader's development, I recommend the very good intermediate level treatment by Bjork in Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time. As a capstone for advanced study, I recommend the advanced treatment of Musiela and Rutkowski's Martingale Methods in Financial Modelling.

Hull starts out with several chapters on the basics of the derivative contracts in his study. The contracts introduced are forward and futures contracts, interest rate swaps, and equity options. The basic definitions of each contingency contract is given, as well as characteristics of the markets where these contracts trade. Some basic trading strategies are also studied.

The study of the option pricing model problem begins in earnest in Chapter 10. The section on one-step binomial tree model leads to a very intuitive description of risk-neutral valuation.

Chapter 11 introduces continuous time stochastic processes in a very intuitive setting. To avoid the hard-core Ito calculus, the author motivates the stochastic differential by considering difference equations. This is a nice technique and makes the material accessible to the beginner. The next highlight is a statement of Ito's lemma. This is not given in full generality, but only stated precisely as needed for Black-Scholes calculations. The appendix gives an intuitive motivation for Ito's lemma based on the multi-dimensional Taylor's formula.
This is a nice illustration as Taylor's formula is indeed a component of the formal semi-martingale based proof of Ito's rule. See for example Oksendal Stochastic Differential Equations: An Introduction with Applications Chapter 4, Karatzas & Shreve Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus Chapter 3, or Rogers and Williams Diffusions, Markov Processes and Martingales: Volume 2, Itô Calculus.

Chapter 12 is devoted to the Black-Scholes-Merton theory of option pricing. The famous Black-Scholes PDE is derived via Ito's rule and application of a delta hedge. The author doesn't directly solve this PDE (via the standard application of the Feyman-Kac formula). Instead a nice proof of the option pricing formula is established in the appendix based on a simple log-normal distribution argument.

Chapter 13 discusses option pricing in for other contingency contracts. In Chapter 14, we return to equity options by studying the Greek letters. The reader discovers the Greek letters can be thought of as coefficients of the Black-Scholes PDE and learns some elementary hedging techniques.

Chapter 15 discusses implied volatility and volatility smiles. It is here that the astute reader gets his first indication that the Black-Scholes theory for option pricing may not be as robust or "true to market" as the reader may have been lead to believe. (The folks at Long-Term Capital Management learned this hard lesson rather publicly.)

A survey of topics of interest follows in the next handful of chapters. The material on value at risk, the GARCH volatility model and exotic options is somewhat superficial. The careless reader will come away feeling he knows quite a bit more than he really does.

Martingale theory is touched on in 21 and the Girsanov Theorem is alluded to, but these topics are really too complex and require too many prerequisites for proper treatment in the context. A general multi-variate version of Ito's Rule is stated in the appendix of this chapter.

The next section of the book deals with term-structure models and their applications. One-factor models are discussed along with the various limitations of each of these models. This gives a nice historical treatment. The Heath-Jarrow-Morton and Libor Market Model k-factor term-structure frameworks are introduced. Without the supporting martingale theory, the analysis of these models presented here is very limited.

The last several chapters of the text are very survey-like and breezily touch on topics such as credit risk, credit derivatives and energy derivatives. There isn't a lot of theory in these chapters at all, but at least the reader is made aware of the existence of these kinds of contingencies.

The book wraps up with a cautionary chapter in the form of lessons learned. The unwary reader might see all of the derivative-related train wrecks and say to himself "well, that won't be me". The problem is that it really might be you if you truly (and foolishly) still believe the equity prices always follow geometric Brownian motion. See Lo & MacKinlay A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street for an excellent exposition into the limitations of the basic assumptions underpinning the Black-Scholes-Merton theory.

If nothing else, Hull's last chapter should convince you that maybe this isn't the only book you'll ever want to read in your study of mathematical finance.

128 of 148 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is by far the best book on the subject., September 20, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Options, Futures, and Other Derivative Securities (Hardcover)

I have read most of the books on derivatives and mathematical finance. I have also read the most important papers on the subject, and no book covers the subject so extensively and so carefully. The difficult math is explained by Hull in a brilliantly intuitive way, without sacrificing the mathematical rigor. He explains succinctly and accurately the heart of the most advanced papers in the subject, in unpretentious terms, and always with the reader in mind (unlike most of the other academics' attempt at writing a book.) Having studied the subject in depth, from a practical and a theoretical point of view, I can say, without reservation, that (up to 1996) this book is all you need to learn about the subject. In fact, I dare say that if you read the book cover to cover you will be an expert in the subject. I read the second version, and some of the most recent topics (like Value at Risk) are not treated in it, but it is my understanding that the third edition includes all of these newer developments. If they are explained as all the other subjects in the 2nd edition, then they should be the best explanations around. Excellent book for novices in the subject, excellent reference book for experts, great mathematical education for finance people, and great financial exposition for mathematicians. (From a mathematical point of view, the only details missing are the mathematical foundations of risk-neutral valuation, i.e. Girsanov's theorem) This book should be read (and more importantly CAN be read) by any financial officer, county treasurer (is Orange County listening?), trader, regulator investor and banker. I also recomend this book to unemployed mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. The starting salary for these quantitative disciplines goes up by $30,000 a year after reading that book.

68 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A PhD student's review, February 6, 2007

By	vidyut - See all my reviews

This review is from: Options, Futures and Other Derivatives (6th Edition) (Hardcover)

Like all too many PhD students trying to push their way into the already overcrowded quant. finance job-space, I too had heard that Hull is the "bible" of quant. finance, and it should be the first book you should read.

WRONG. Dead wrong. Hull should be the LAST book you should read, and I mean it literally. That is, you definitely SHOULD read Hull, but after reading some good quant. finance books and getting some intuition behind what is going on.

The good parts of Hull are:

1) breadth of topics covered - there is no other single book that covers the range of topics that Hull does.
2) some amount of feel of real markets that it gives (all this means is that it describes the mechanics of markets).

For someone just starting out learning quant. finance, however, the above two become big stumbling blocks. The breadth of topics means that several topics are covered in a, and I am being kind, patchy manner. In fact, you can go through quite a lot of Mr. Hull's babble about "worlds" (something he uses interchangeably for "measure") without understanding whatever the heck a risk-neutral measure is. There are risk-neutral worlds, forward-neutral worlds, stock-worlds...and you don't know the underlying simple, simple principle, so you just keep following him, and he goes on and on...

Another example - Black's formula in fixed income products - he just goes on and on about its applications to this that and the other (bond options, swaptions...), discusses the "validity of Black's formula" (which supposedly tells you that it is more general that it is usually believed to be, but tells you neither how general it is, nor how general it is believed to be)...All this without giving you the simple, one sentence reasoning behind the Black formula.

Time and again in the book there are formulae that seem to be just pulled out of thin air. There are better compilations of formulae (Haug, for example), so I don't quite understand what the idea is. You keep wondering HOW a valuation formula came about, because you want to know what assumptions lie behind that valuation, and how to change it if some of those assumptions change...But as frequently as not, you will be left turning pages in the vain hope of trying to find out.

Add to that a poorly composed index, ill defined terms sprinkled all over the book, hand-waving galore, and it equates to hours of frustration. Just understanding clearly what is being talked about takes a lot of page turning, searching for definitions and so on.

And don't go by people who look down folks wanting to be precise. I am not talking about any ivory tower precision - I am talking about real, practical precision. The precision you need in a book to be able to answer a non-rote question properly. That precision is not there in most of Hull.