The purpose of this paper is to compare the European Union (EU) and United States (U.S.) securities regulations. In November 2007, the market in financial instruments directive 2004/39/EC (MiFID) ...came into force in the EU, and brought about deep changes in the market infrastructure. The same year regulations National Market System (NMS) in the U.S. was fully enacted and reformed equities markets. This study compares MiFID with the corresponding U.S. regulations, and primarily focuses on the regulatory and supervisory framework, trading venues, and the provision of investment services. Implementation of the rules enforcement and right to redress are beyond the scope of this paper. Likewise, the paper does not intend to judge the effectiveness of the two regulatory systems.
The field of financial mathematics has developed tremendously over the past thirty years, and the underlying models that have taken shape in interest rate markets and bond markets, being much richer ...in structure than equity-derivative models, are particularly fascinating and complex. This book introduces the tools required for the arbitrage-free modelling of the dynamics of these markets. Andrew Cairns addresses not only seminal works but also modern developments. Refreshingly broad in scope, covering numerical methods, credit risk, and descriptive models, and with an approachable sequence of opening chapters, Interest Rate Models will make readers--be they graduate students, academics, or practitioners--confident enough to develop their own interest rate models or to price nonstandard derivatives using existing models.
The mathematical chapters begin with the simple binomial model that introduces many core ideas. But the main chapters work their way systematically through all of the main developments in continuous-time interest rate modelling. The book describes fully the broad range of approaches to interest rate modelling: short-rate models, no-arbitrage models, the Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework, multifactor models, forward measures, positive-interest models, and market models. Later chapters cover some related topics, including numerical methods, credit risk, and model calibration. Significantly, the book develops the martingale approach to bond pricing in detail, concentrating on risk-neutral pricing, before later exploring recent advances in interest rate modelling where different pricing measures are important.
This paper consolidates previous work on the development of secondary markets for government securities, and focuses on the sequencing of measures necessary for their development. Six main lessons ...are identified: (i) a commitment to achieving and maintaining a stable macroeconomic environment, especially prudent fiscal policy, should underpin market development; (ii) a sound and transparent public debt management strategy supports secondary market activity; (iii) a deep and diverse investor base is required; (iv) poor market infrastructure leads to high transaction costs, slow order execution, and excessive operational risk, which all inhibit trading; (v) secondary market growth is facilitated by effective monetary policy implementation; and (vi) reforms should be sequenced to ensure even development of all the structures supporting the secondary market.
Firms often disclose information security risk factors in public filings such as 10-K reports. The internal information associated with disclosures may be positive or negative. In this paper, we ...evaluate how the nature of the disclosed security risk factors, believed to represent the firm's internal information regarding information security, is associated with future breach announcements reported in the media. For this purpose, we build a decision tree model, which classifies the occurrence of future security breaches based on the textual contents of the disclosed security risk factors. The model is able to accurately associate disclosure characteristics with breach announcements about 77% of the time. We further explore the contents of the security risk factors using text-mining techniques to provide a richer interpretation of the results. The results show that the disclosed security risk factors with risk-mitigation themes are less likely to be related to future breach announcements. We also investigate how the market interprets the nature of information security risk factors in annual reports. We find that the market reaction following the security breach announcement is different depending on the nature of the preceding disclosure. Thus, our paper contributes to the literature in information security and sheds light on how market participants can better interpret security risk factors disclosed in financial reports at the time when financial reports are released.
Building upon the ideas introduced in their previous book, Derivatives in Financial Markets with Stochastic Volatility, the authors study the pricing and hedging of financial derivatives under ...stochastic volatility in equity, interest-rate, and credit markets. They present and analyze multiscale stochastic volatility models and asymptotic approximations. These can be used in equity markets, for instance, to link the prices of path-dependent exotic instruments to market implied volatilities. The methods are also used for interest rate and credit derivatives. Other applications considered include variance-reduction techniques, portfolio optimization, forward-looking estimation of CAPM 'beta', and the Heston model and generalizations of it. 'Off-the-shelf' formulas and calibration tools are provided to ease the transition for practitioners who adopt this new method. The attention to detail and explicit presentation make this also an excellent text for a graduate course in financial and applied mathematics.
Codes of finance Lepinay, Vincent Antonin
2011., 20110808, 2011, 2011-08-08, 20110101, 2011-08
eBook, Book
The financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. Codes of Finance ...takes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at one of the world's leading investment banks before the crisis, providing a detailed firsthand account of the creation, marketing, selling, accounting, and management of these financial instruments--and of how they ultimately created havoc inside and outside the bank.
Ascertaining which enforcement mechanisms work to protect investors has been both a focus of recent work in academic finance and an issue for policy-making at international development agencies. ...According to recent academic work, private enforcement of investor protection via both disclosure and private liability rules goes hand in hand with financial market development, but public enforcement fails to correlate with financial development and, hence, is unlikely to facilitate it. Our results confirm the disclosure result but reverse the results on both liability standards and public enforcement. We use securities regulators’ resources to proxy for regulatory intensity of the securities regulator. When we do, financial depth regularly, significantly, and robustly correlates with stronger public enforcement. In horse races between these resource-based measures of public enforcement intensity and the most common measures of private enforcement, public enforcement is overall as important as disclosure in explaining financial market outcomes around the world and more important than private liability rules. Hence, policymakers who reject public enforcement as useful for financial market development are ignoring the best currently available evidence.
A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high- frequency trading have altered global financial markets In today's financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and ...sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions. Trading at the Speed of Light tells the story of this epic transformation. Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading—automated high-frequency trading or HFT—began and then spread throughout the world. HFT has brought new efficiency to global trading, but has also created an unrelenting race for speed, leading to a systematic, subterranean battle among HFT algorithms.In HFT, time is measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and in a nanosecond the fastest possible signal—light in a vacuum—can travel only thirty centimeters, or roughly a foot. That makes HFT exquisitely sensitive to the length and transmission capacity of the cables connecting computer servers to the exchanges' systems and to the location of the microwave towers that carry signals between computer datacenters. Drawing from more than 300 interviews with high-frequency traders, the people who supply them with technological and communication capabilities, exchange staff, regulators, and many others, MacKenzie reveals the extraordinary efforts expended to speed up every aspect of trading. He looks at how in some markets big banks have fought off the challenge from HFT firms, and how exchanges sometimes engineer technical systems to favor certain types of algorithms over others.Focusing on the material, political, and economic characteristics of high-frequency trading, Trading at the Speed of Light offers a unique glimpse into its influence on global finance and where it could lead us in the future.
PDF
