Riccardo Rebonato

In recent years, interest-rate modeling has developed rapidly in terms of both practice and theory. The academic and practitioners' communities, however, have not always communicated as productively as would have been desirable. As a result, their research programs have often developed with little constructive interference. In this book, Riccardo Rebonato draws on his academic and professional experience, straddling both sides of the divide to bring together and build on what theory and trading have to offer. Rebonato begins by presenting the conceptual foundations for the application of the LIBOR market model to the pricing of interest-rate derivatives. Next he treats in great detail the calibration of this model to market prices, asking how possible and advisable it is to enforce a simultaneous fitting to several market observables. He does so with an eye not only to mathematical feasibility but also to financial justification, while devoting special scrutiny to the implications of market incompleteness. Much of the book concerns an original extension of the LIBOR market model, devised to account for implied volatility smiles. This is done by introducing a stochastic-volatility, displaced-diffusion version of the model. The emphasis again is on the financial justification and on the computational feasibility of the proposed solution to the smile problem. This book is must reading for quantitative researchers in financial houses, sophisticated practitioners in the derivatives area, and students of finance.

The LIBOR Market Model and Beyond

Modern Pricing of Interest-Rate Derivatives

Alexander Denev

A rigorous presentation of a novel methodology for asset allocation in financial portfolios under conditions of market distress.

A Bayesian-Net Approach to Coherent Asset Allocation

Portfolio Management under Stress

Today's top financial professionals have come to rely on ever-more sophisticated mathematics in their attempts to come to grips with financial risk. But this excessive reliance on quantitative precision is misleading--and puts everyone at risk. In Plight of the Fortune Tellers, Riccardo Rebonato forcefully argues that we must restore genuine decision making to our financial planning. Presenting a financial model that uses probability, experimental psychology, and decision theory, Rebonato challenges us to rethink the standard wisdom about risk management. He offers a radical yet surprisingly commonsense solution: managing risk comes down to real people making decisions under uncertainty. Plight of the Fortune Tellers is a must-read for anyone concerned about how today's financial markets are run. In a new preface, Rebonato explains how the ideas presented in this book fit into the context of the global financial crisis that followed its original publication. He argues that risk managers are still stuck in a probabilistic rut, and need to engage with the structural causes of real events.

Why We Need to Manage Financial Risk Differently

Plight of the Fortune Tellers

In Volatility and Correlation 2nd edition: The Perfect Hedger and the Fox, Rebonato looks at derivatives pricing from the angle of volatility and correlation. With both practical and theoretical applications, this is a thorough update of the highly successful Volatility & Correlation – with over 80% new or fully reworked material and is a must have both for practitioners and for students. The new and updated material includes a critical examination of the ‘perfect-replication’ approach to derivatives pricing, with special attention given to exotic options; a thorough analysis of the role of quadratic variation in derivatives pricing and hedging; a discussion of the informational efficiency of markets in commonly-used calibration and hedging practices. Treatment of new models including Variance Gamma, displaced diffusion, stochastic volatility for interest-rate smiles and equity/FX options. The book is split into four parts. Part I deals with a Black world without smiles, sets out the author’s ‘philosophical’ approach and covers deterministic volatility. Part II looks at smiles in equity and FX worlds. It begins with a review of relevant empirical information about smiles, and provides coverage of local-stochastic-volatility, general-stochastic-volatility, jump-diffusion and Variance-Gamma processes. Part II concludes with an important chapter that discusses if and to what extent one can dispense with an explicit specification of a model, and can directly prescribe the dynamics of the smile surface. Part III focusses on interest rates when the volatility is deterministic. Part IV extends this setting in order to account for smiles in a financially motivated and computationally tractable manner. In this final part the author deals with CEV processes, with diffusive stochastic volatility and with Markov-chain processes. Praise for the First Edition: “In this book, Dr Rebonato brings his penetrating eye to bear on option pricing and hedging.... The book is a must-read for those who already know the basics of options and are looking for an edge in applying the more sophisticated approaches that have recently been developed.” —Professor Ian Cooper, London Business School “Volatility and correlation are at the very core of all option pricing and hedging. In this book, Riccardo Rebonato presents the subject in his characteristically elegant and simple fashion...A rare combination of intellectual insight and practical common sense.” —Anthony Neuberger, London Business School

The Perfect Hedger and the Fox

Volatility and Correlation

Richard White

Kenneth McKay

This book presents a major innovation in the interest rate space. It explains a financially motivated extension of the LIBOR Market model which accurately reproduces the prices for plain vanilla hedging instruments (swaptions and caplets) of all strikes and maturities produced by the SABR model. The authors show how to accurately recover the whole of the SABR smile surface using their extension of the LIBOR market model. This is not just a new model, this is a new way of option pricing that takes into account the need to calibrate as accurately as possible to the plain vanilla reference hedging instruments and the need to obtain prices and hedges in reasonable time whilst reproducing a realistic future evolution of the smile surface. It removes the hard choice between accuracy and time because the framework that the authors provide reproduces today's market prices of plain vanilla options almost exactly and simultaneously gives a reasonable future evolution for the smile surface. The authors take the SABR model as the starting point for their extension of the LMM because it is a good model for European options. The problem, however with SABR is that it treats each European option in isolation and the processes for the various underlyings (forward and swap rates) do not talk to each other so it isn't obvious how to relate these processes into the dynamics of the whole yield curve. With this new model, the authors bring the dynamics of the various forward rates and stochastic volatilities under a single umbrella. To ensure the absence of arbitrage they derive drift adjustments to be applied to both the forward rates and their volatilities. When this is completed, complex derivatives that depend on the joint realisation of all relevant forward rates can now be priced. Contents THE THEORETICAL SET-UP The Libor Market model The SABR Model The LMM-SABR Model IMPLEMENTATION AND CALIBRATION Calibrating the LMM-SABR model to Market Caplet prices Calibrating the LMM/SABR model to Market Swaption Prices Calibrating the Correlation Structure EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE The Empirical problem Estimating the volatility of the forward rates Estimating the correlation structure Estimating the volatility of the volatility HEDGING Hedging the Volatility Structure Hedging the Correlation Structure Hedging in conditions of market stress

Pricing, Calibration and Hedging for Complex Interest-Rate Derivatives

The SABR/LIBOR Market Model

Libertarian Paternalism has been hailed by its proponents as the 'true Third Way'. It attempts to reconcile paternalism and libertarianism, and claims to provide freedom-preserving solutions to some of the most intractable problems faced by contemporary Western societies. The bounded rationality of voters is not ignored, but is exploited for their greater good. The approach is cheap to implement, and, its proponents claim, often very effective. What is there to dislike? In Taking Liberties, Rebonato examines whether the freedom-preserving claims of libertarian paternalism truly stand up to scrutiny; questions the degree of effective decisional autonomy it affords; and raises concerns about the transparency deficit of the programme and about its supposed value-neutrality. Taking Liberties argues that libertarian paternalism fails to respect decisional autonomy exactly if individuals truly are as cognitively impaired as libertarian paternalists claim. If this is the case, exploiting the citizens' decisional deficiencies (even for the own good) poses difficult moral and political issues, which are largely ignored in the libertarian paternalistic literature. If, on the other hand, the cognitive shortcomings of individuals are not as pervasive and 'hard-wired' as the behavioural finance literature seems to suggest – and Rebonato reports convincing evidence to this effect – a completely different programme, aimed at improving the quality of the whole decision process, not just of the outcomes, becomes more desirable and defensible. If we accept that some degree of paternalistic intervention by the state is desirable, Rebonato argues that, paradoxically, a hard, transparent and highly visible form of paternalism may be more desirable – if for no other reason than for the ability it gives voters to reject it. As they engage in this process of acceptance or rejection, Rebonato claims, citizens and voters make use of their critical faculties, engaging in a process that has value over and above a narrow evaluation of the outcomes. The libertarian paternalistic alternative is not attractive: by accepting the supposed cognitive limitations of individuals as inevitable, and by attempting to systematically exploit them, libertarian paternalism can dull our critical faculties, and, in the end, the programme can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not a perspective than any true libertarian should cherish. 'The slumber of reason generates monsters', Goya wrote. Turning these monsters into pleasant dreams without waking up the sleeper may be possible. But is it desirable? In Taking Liberties, Rebonato argues that it is not.

A Critical Examination of Libertarian Paternalism

Taking Liberties

"Overall this book provides an excellent summary of the state of knowledge of term structure modelling. It combines a solid academic background with the practical experience of someone who works in the financial sector." Alan White and John Hull, A-J Financial Systems, Canada The modelling of exotic interest-rate options is such an important and fast-moving area, that the updating of the extremely successful first edition has been eagerly awaited. This edition re-focuses the assessment of various models presented in the first edition, in light of the new developments of modelling imperfect correlation between financial quantities. It also presents a substantial new chapter devoted to this revolutionary modelling method. In this second edition, readers will also find important new data dealing with the securities markets and the probabilistic/stochastic calculus tools. Other changes include: a new chapter on the issues arising in the pricing of several classes of exotic interest-rate instruments; and insights from the BDT and the Brennan and Schwartz approaches which can be combined into a new class of "generalised models". Further details can be found on the links between mean-reversion and calibration for important classes of models.

Understanding, Analysing and Using Models for Exotic Interest-Rate Options

Interest-Rate Option Models

Rebonato provides an authoritative, clear, and up-to-date explanation of the cutting-edge innovations in affine modeling for government bonds, and provides readers with the precise tools to develop their own models. This book combines precise theory with up-to-date empirical evidence to build, with the minimum mathematical sophistication required for the task, a critical understanding of what drives the government bond market.

A Structural Approach

Bond Pricing and Yield Curve Modeling

In Coherent Stress Testing: A Bayesian Approach, industry expert Riccardo Rebonato presents a groundbreaking new approach to this important but often undervalued part of the risk management toolkit. Based on the author's extensive work, research and presentations in the area, the book fills a gap in quantitative risk management by introducing a new and very intuitively appealing approach to stress testing based on expert judgement and Bayesian networks. It constitutes a radical departure from the traditional statistical methodologies based on Economic Capital or Extreme-Value-Theory approaches. The book is split into four parts. Part I looks at stress testing and at its role in modern risk management. It discusses the distinctions between risk and uncertainty, the different types of probability that are used in risk management today and for which tasks they are best used. Stress testing is positioned as a bridge between the statistical areas where VaR can be effective and the domain of total Keynesian uncertainty. Part II lays down the quantitative foundations for the concepts described in the rest of the book. Part III takes readers through the application of the tools discussed in part II, and introduces two different systematic approaches to obtaining a coherent stress testing output that can satisfy the needs of industry users and regulators. In part IV the author addresses more practical questions such as embedding the suggestions of the book into a viable governance structure.

Riccardo Rebonato

About

Books

Join the club