Financial Derivatives

1. Introduction; 2. Preliminary mathematics; 3. Principles of financial valuation; 4. Interest rate models; 5. Mathematics of asset pricing; 6. Bibliography.

Jamil Baz is the chief investment strategist of GLG, a London-based hedge fund. Prior to holding this position, he was a portfolio manager with PIMCO in London, a managing director in the Proprietary Trading Group of Goldman Sachs, chief investment strategist of Deutsche Bank, and executive director of Lehman Brothers fixed income research division. Dr Baz teaches financial economics at Oxford University. He has degrees from the London School of Economics (M.Sc.), MIT (S.M.), and Harvard University (A.M., Ph.D.). Professor George Chacko has split his time between the academic and commercial worlds during his career. His past commercial experience has included work at Accenture and Prudential Investments. Most recently, he was a managing director heading fixed income sales and trading at State Street Bank, a managing director in pension asset management at IFL, and the chief investment officer of Auda Alternative Investments. He has co-founded and sold three financial services businesses over his career. He is currently the managing partner of Confluentis Investments. His past academic experience has been at Harvard Business School, where he served as a professor in the finance department for ten years. He also served as a visiting professor at the Indian School of Business. He is currently a professor in the finance department at Santa Clara University. His research interests have been in the areas of fixed income and derivatives research, portfolio choice and construction, and the microstructure of financial markets. He has a BS from MIT in Electrical Engineering, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD from Harvard University in Business Economics.

'This introduction to the modeling of financial derivatives is ideal for quantitatively oriented traders, bank researchers, and masters or doctoral students in this field. The book has an elegant balance of concepts and applications that allows a full understanding of why the models work, without an overburden of technical details. Broader than its title suggests, the book contains a strong grounding in models of stochastic processes for financial applications, including portfolio choice and asset pricing theory.' Darrell Duffie, Stanford University 'In Financial Derivatives, Jamil Baz and George Chacko have shown their powerful command of the subject by combining a rigorous mathematical development with an intuitive presentation format that makes the complex analysis of derivative securities truly accessible to both the academic and practitioner who wants a deep foundation and breadth of applications. The discriminating choices of which financial instruments to include and the carefully selected examples to anchor each concept reflect their combined experiences as serious academic researchers, skilled practitioners, and seasoned teachers. The reader is in for a treat: Bon Appetit!' Robert Menton, Nobel Laureate, Harvard Business School 'Jamil Baz and George Chacko have written an invaluable book that combines the technical and the practical aspects of derivatives pricing, interest rate models, and pricing complex financial instruments in a manner that is accessible to the sophisticated and the lay reader. They handle the material in a pedagogical manner which makes it appropriate for graduate level finance courses and practitioners. This book is a must read for those looking to educate themselves on these topics.' Franco Modigliani, Nobel Laureate, MIT 'This book is a summa in the field of financial derivatives that will become the standard reference. The authors have masterfully written a reader-friendly book, accessible to graduate students in finance as well as