Stochastic Calculus For Finance

Stochastic Calculus for Finance evolved from the first ten years of the Carnegie Mellon Professional Master's program in Computational Finance. The content of this book has been used successfully with students whose mathematics background consists of calculus and calculus-based probability. The text gives both precise statements of results, plausibility arguments, and even some proofs, but more importantly intuitive explanations developed and refine through classroom experience with this material are provided. The book includes a self-contained treatment of the probability theory needed for stochastic calculus, including Brownian motion and its properties. Advanced topics include foreign exchange models, forward measures, and jump-diffusion processes.

Although there are many textbooks on stochastic calculus applied to finance, this volume earns its place with a pedagogical approach. The text presents a quick (but by no means "dirty") road to the tools required for advanced finance in continuous time, including option pricing by martingale methods, term structure models in a HJM-framework and the Libor market model. The reader should be familiar with elementary real analysis and basic probability theory.