Book Image

Python for Finance - Second Edition

By : Yuxing Yan
5 (1)
Book Image

Python for Finance - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Yuxing Yan

Overview of this book

This book uses Python as its computational tool. Since Python is free, any school or organization can download and use it. This book is organized according to various finance subjects. In other words, the first edition focuses more on Python, while the second edition is truly trying to apply Python to finance. The book starts by explaining topics exclusively related to Python. Then we deal with critical parts of Python, explaining concepts such as time value of money stock and bond evaluations, capital asset pricing model, multi-factor models, time series analysis, portfolio theory, options and futures. This book will help us to learn or review the basics of quantitative finance and apply Python to solve various problems, such as estimating IBM’s market risk, running a Fama-French 3-factor, 5-factor, or Fama-French-Carhart 4 factor model, estimating the VaR of a 5-stock portfolio, estimating the optimal portfolio, and constructing the efficient frontier for a 20-stock portfolio with real-world stock, and with Monte Carlo Simulation. Later, we will also learn how to replicate the famous Black-Scholes-Merton option model and how to price exotic options such as the average price call option.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Python for Finance Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Introduction to portfolio theory


The keyword for the portfolio theory is diversification, while the keyword for diversification is correlation. In other words, correlation is used to measure how closely two stocks or portfolios are moving together. The objective of portfolio theory is to allocate our assets optimally with respect to risk and return. Markowitz (1952) argues that we should consider only the first two moments of a security's return distribution: mean and variance. For financial markets, several important assumptions are made, such as stock markets are inefficient, a typical investor is rational, and an arbitrage opportunity would not last long. For the preferences between two stocks, for a given risk, a rational investor would prefer stock with a higher expected return; for a given return, a rational investor prefers stock with a lower risk level. Sometimes, a single period portfolio optimization is called Markowitz Portfolio Optimization. The input includes a return matrix...