People by and large tend to postpone their present consumption for numerous reasons. This postponement of consumption leaves them with surplus money to invest for future consumption. Amongst the number of alternatives avenues present for such investments, gold too tends to be one of them. People...

This research aims to construct a model for pricing counterparty credit risk (CCR) for synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) tranches by considering the relationship between the counterparty and the credit port- folio. A stochastic intensity model is adopted to describe the default...

Once upon a time there was a classical financial world in which all the Libors were equal. Standard textbooks taught that simple relations held, such that, for example, a 6 months Libor Deposit was replicable with a 3 months Libor Deposits plus a 3x6 months Forward Rate Agreement (FRA), and that...

It is widely debated whether financial speculation was a significant force behind recent food price fluctuations. As a matter of fact, during the 2000s agricultural commodity derivatives markets were flooded by a ‘wall of money’ coming from financial investors. In agricultural exchanges, the...

This paper utilizes a new approach to an examination of price impacts of speculators on futures markets. It focuses initially on specially obtained data on commodity “pools,” which are large funds of money that may move quickly between and across futures markets and other financial markets;...

The standard measures of distress risk ignore the fact that firm defaults are correlated and that some defaults are more likely to occur in bad times. We use risk premium computed from corporate credit spreads to measure a firm’s exposure to systematic variation in default risk. Unlike...

This study investigates correlations between India’s bustling single stock futures (SSFs) and its peculiar Badla mechanism. Data from the world’s most active SSF market, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India, are used. The results indicated that both the Badla mechanism and the...

We study the value of European security derivatives in the Black-Scholes model when the underlying asset ξ is approximated by random walks ξ⁽ⁿ⁾. We obtain an explicit error formula, up to a term of order O(n^{-(3/2)}), which is valid for general approximating schemes and general payoff...

We review the main changes in the interbank market after the financial crisis started in August 2007. In particular, we focus on the fixed income market and we analyse the most relevant empirical evidences regarding the divergence of the existing basis between interbank rates with different...

In the 1990s, companies collected billions in premiums from peculiarly structured put options written on their own stock while almost all of these puts expired worthless. Buyers of these options, primarily �nancial intermediaries, lost money as a result. Although these losses might seem...