An Introduction to Financial Option Valuation : Mathematics, Stochastics and Computation

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended - a joy to read . . .
Review: If you are looking for an introduction to financial option valuation that is well-written and well-referenced than this book is for you. Prof. Higham is an excellent author (I highly recommend his other books Learning LaTeX and MATLAB Guide) and so anything he writes is a joy to read. His latest book is no exception. It is full of figures that help bring the equations and the ideas to life. Like many of his technical papers (which I also recommend you read - they are available at his website), he has incorporated MATLAB (a powerful matrix manipulation and numerical simulation tool) codes throughout the book (not only does he provide code listings but you can actually download the codes and run them assuming you own the software or have a license - I have!). The codes are a great way to see the equations in practice if you don't have MATLAB and experiment with some of the key parameters yourself if you do. Regarding the subject of the book itself, let me say that I am in the mechanical engineering field and can barely balance my checkbook - ok, my wife does it for me) but I am interested in all things mathematical and find the subject of option valuation (and the possibility of making some extra money) enticing. The book clearly introduces topics related to random numbers and stochastics, as well as finite-difference approximations for partial differential equations. The ultimate goal is the Black-Scholes PDE which is treated in the later half of the book. Monte Carlo simulation techniques as applied to finance are covered as well in several chapters. What I really enjoy about this book (and his other books) is the way he actually tries to teach and advise the reader - a good writer must be sensitive to his/her audience - and this is most appreciated by myself and others I am sure. The bottomline is that this is the first book to own if you want to get into the field of computational finance (his references tell you where to go next). I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A good hands-on intro to option valuation
Review: There are a lot of derivatives books out there - most of them follow the same approach. This one's different: no complicated measure-theoretic probability theory (of absolutely no use to practitioners), but lots of hands-on Matlab examples. A very reasonable price too. My only suggestion to the author would be to provide more appropriate names to his Matlab functions (instead of chapter numbers) - but this can easily be changed by the reader.