K|Quant.com

Really liked the layout of this site on Quant finance. Looks like the author is a UCB alum based in London. Nice links and good recommendations on books.

K|Quant.com

Well, I should vamp up my site a bit, am getting tired of the same old. I do wish Blogger would offer more features - such as categories, etc. Companies like typepad are offering so much more...

MathFinance

Well, in case we were getting worried about the dearth of fin engg and fin math websites, here is another one (based out of Germany):

MathFinance

Happy thanksgiving...

Inverted yield curve ...

Well, yield curve has become a buzz word again.. thanks to a closing gap between the short-term and long-term interest rates (0.08 as opposed to an average 0.75 spread). Economists fear that if rates in the short term exceed the long term, we could have the infamous "inverted yield curve" on our hands, a sign of impending economic downturn (as thought by some people, others debate it as well). This will ofcourse have implications on the real-estate bubble, and the rest of the economy as well..

Lets hope we ride this one out!!

Breaking News...

MFE internship salaries up 22%. hmm :))) Sweet!!!Haas NewsWire - November 14, 2005

Looks like almost 50% of this year's class is working in NYC this year, which alleviates my earlier concerns about Berkeley's location (dis)advantage.

"Real" Options

Using Financial engineering in Business Strategy

In the corp finance class, we touched on Real options - the new and improved way to make capital budgeting decisions. I guess the central idea is that NPV type calculations assume that the decision for projects need to take place in present time and ignore the value of waiting for the "right" time of a project.
A primer on this can be found here (no math :))Using real options in strategic decision making

Looks like real-options can also be used instead of traditional DCF techniques for company valuations.

Active Portfolio Mgmt

With talks of ETFs going the actively-managed way (instead of passively tracking an index), I decided to understand what exactly is active portfolio mgmt? Turns out this will be an elective in MFE, so decided to hold my horses till then.

Some search on this matter lead me to this site (authors of "The Ultimate Investor"), which contains good information regaridng active portfolio mgmt, risk mgmt, financial engineering, and quantitative investing.

Links
Active Portfolio Management
Financial Engineering

Interesting course..

Link to an interesting course - from the bastion of financial engineering - HBS ((j/k of course :))
HBS MBA Program. - Half-Course: Corporate Financial Engineering

Interesting because it appears to teach FE and risk mgmt from the perspective of corporate financial managers.

breaktime: DE Shaw culture

This link from excite gives a good overview of DEShaw - a prominent hedge fund.Excite-
There are links to other companies as well on the same website.

Cost of capital and CAPM

It was an interesting discussion in the Corp Finance class yesterday about the Capital structure and cost of capital (WACC, MCC, MM theory, etc), and one thing that came up was how leveraged betas are used to calculate the cost of equity. The procedure to estimate a company's beta, however seemed a bit convuluted. The beta is first calculated from historic data (which is also based on a host of fators like length of data considered, market indice considered, etc); but then apparently firms like Bloomberg or Barra weight the historical betas towards one to produce an adjusted "beta". I am not sure if this even makes any sense. I found this paper which sort of puts things in perspective and suggests alternatives for beta estimation based on operating and financial leverage ratios.

www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/papers/beta.pdf

The Wavelet Digest :: Index

Wavelets digest
The Wavelet Digest :: Index

I had used wavelets briefly when they were in vogue. Need to keep in touch with the latest developments in this area..

Banking 101

Banking careers 101. I need more of such articles/resources to decide on a career choice post MFE Finance jobs, banking jobs, recruitment in investment banking & in the financial markets

Buyside - Ideas For Today's Institutional Investors

Link to a good magazine for Buyside. Buyside - Ideas For Today's Institutional Investors

Sorry to have been out for so long.. was travelling on business. Great to be back to sunny california!!