Monte Carlo Simulation with Applications to Finance (Chapman & Hall/CRC Financial Mathematics)

Developed from the author’s course on Monte Carlo simulation at Brown University, **Monte Carlo Simulation with Applications to Finance** provides a self-contained introduction to Monte Carlo methods in financial engineering. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking a one-semester course or for practitioners in the financial industry. The author first presents the necessary mathematical tools for simulation, arbitrary free option pricing, and the basic implementation of Monte Carlo schemes. He then describes variance reduction techniques, including control variates, stratification, conditioning, importance sampling, and cross-entropy. The text concludes with stochastic calculus and the simulation of diffusion processes. Only requiring some familiarity with probability and statistics, the book keeps much of the mathematics at an informal level and avoids technical measure-theoretic jargon to provide a practical understanding of the basics. It includes a large number of examples as well as MATLAB^®^ coding exercises that are designed in a progressive manner so that no prior experience with MATLAB is needed. "Preface This book can serve as the text for a one-semester course on Monte Carlo simulation. The intended audience is advanced undergraduate students or students on master's programs who wish to learn the basics of this exciting topic and its applications to finance. The book is largely self-contained. The only prerequisite is some experience with probability and statistics. Prior knowledge on option pricing is helpful but not essential. As in any study of Monte Carlo simulation, coding is an integral part and cannot be ignored. The book contains a large number of MATLAB coding exercises. They are designed in a progressive manner so that no prior experience with MATLAB is required. Much of the mathematics in the book is informal. For example, randomvariables are simply defined to be functions on the sample space, even though they should be measurable with respect to appropriate algebras; exchanging the order of integrations is carried out liberally, even though it should be justified by the Tonelli-Fubini Theorem. The motivation for doing so is to avoid the technical measure theoretic jargon, which is of little concern in practice and does not help much to further the understanding of the topic. The book is an extension of the lecture notes that I have developed for an undergraduate course on Monte Carlo simulation at Brown University. I would like to thank the students who have taken the course, as well as the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown, for their support. Hui Wang Providence, Rhode Island January, 2012"-- Provided by publisher Developed from the author's course on Monte Carlo simulation at Brown University, this text provides a self-contained introduction to Monte Carlo methods in financial engineering. It covers common variance reduction techniques, the cross-entropy method, and the simulation of diffusion process models. Requiring minimal background in mathematics and finance, the book includes numerous examples of option pricing, risk analysis, and sensitivity analysis as well as many hand-and-paper and MATLAB coding exercises at the end of every chapter. Preface 6 Contents 8 Review of Probability 12 Brownian Motion 42 Arbitrage Free Pricing 62 Monte Carlo Simulation 78 Generating Random Variables 98 Variance Reduction Techniques 114 Importance Sampling 144 Stochastic Calculus 194 Simulation of Diffusions 216 Sensitivity Analysis 248 Multivariate Normal Distributions 268 American Option Pricing 270 Option Pricing Formulas 280 Bibliography 288 1439858241,-,Monte,Carlo,Simulation,with,Applications,to,Finance 1439858241 - Monte Carlo Simulation with Applications to Finance