Book Image

Python for Finance Cookbook

By : Eryk Lewinson
Book Image

Python for Finance Cookbook

By: Eryk Lewinson

Overview of this book

Python is one of the most popular programming languages used in the financial industry, with a huge set of accompanying libraries. In this book, you'll cover different ways of downloading financial data and preparing it for modeling. You'll calculate popular indicators used in technical analysis, such as Bollinger Bands, MACD, RSI, and backtest automatic trading strategies. Next, you'll cover time series analysis and models, such as exponential smoothing, ARIMA, and GARCH (including multivariate specifications), before exploring the popular CAPM and the Fama-French three-factor model. You'll then discover how to optimize asset allocation and use Monte Carlo simulations for tasks such as calculating the price of American options and estimating the Value at Risk (VaR). In later chapters, you'll work through an entire data science project in the financial domain. You'll also learn how to solve the credit card fraud and default problems using advanced classifiers such as random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and stacked models. You'll then be able to tune the hyperparameters of the models and handle class imbalance. Finally, you'll focus on learning how to use deep learning (PyTorch) for approaching financial tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to effectively analyze financial data using a recipe-based approach.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Pricing American options with Least Squares Monte Carlo

In this recipe, we learn how to valuate American options. The key difference between European and American options is that the latter can be exercised at any time before and including the maturity date basically, whenever the underlying asset's price moves favorably for the option holder.

This behavior introduces additional complexity to the valuation and there is no closed-form solution to this problem. When using Monte-Carlo simulations, we cannot only look at the terminal value on each sample path, as the option's exercise can happen anywhere along the path. That is why we need to employ a more sophisticated approach called Least Squares Monte Carlo (LSMC), which was introduced by Longstaff and Schwartz (2001).

First of all, the time axis spanning [0, T] is discretized into a finite number of equally...