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Plus, more links to make you a little bit smarter today.
Use AI to improve, not do it for you.
How To Make A (Super) Hard Drive From Scratch
This week’s article is a bit all over the place, but it ended up being a lot of fun: we’re going to dive into the world of how chips are manufactured (the electronic kind) and dive into the theory around making one of the world’s most advanced storage devices.
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it’s just a shot of nothing.
Macroscopic Market Making Games
In continuation of the macroscopic market making à la Avellaneda-Stoikov as a control problem, this paper explores its stochastic game. Concerning the price competition, each agent is compared with the best quote from the others. We start with the linear case. While constructing the solution directly, the ordering property and the dimension reduction in the equilibrium are revealed. For the non-linear case, extending the decoupling approach, we introduce a multidimensional characteristic equation to study the well-posedness of forward-backward stochastic differential equations. Properties of coefficients in the characteristic equation are obtained via non-smooth analysis. In addition to novel well-posedness results, the linear price impact arises and the impact function can be further decomposed into two parts in some examples.
Can market volumes reveal traders' rationality and a new risk premium?
An empirical analysis, suggested by optimal Merton dynamics, reveals some unexpected features of asset volumes. These features are connected to traders' belief and risk aversion. This paper proposes a trading strategy model in the optimal Merton framework that is representative of the collective behavior of heterogeneous rational traders. This model allows for the estimation of the average risk aversion of traders acting on a specific risky asset, while revealing the existence of a price of risk closely related to market price of risk and volume rate. The empirical analysis, conducted on real data, confirms the validity of the proposed model.
Derivatives of Risk Measures
This paper provides the first and second order derivatives of any risk measures, including VaR and ES for continuous and discrete portfolio loss random variable variables. Also, we give asymptotic results of the first and second order conditional moments for heavy-tailed portfolio loss random variable.
Dynamic Asset Pricing in a Unified Bachelier-Black-Scholes-Merton Model
We present a unified, market-complete model that integrates both the Bachelier and Black-Scholes-Merton frameworks for asset pricing. The model allows for the study, within a unified framework, of asset pricing in a natural world that experiences the possibility of negative security prices or riskless rates. In contrast to classical Black-Scholes-Merton, we show that option pricing in the unified model displays a difference depending on whether the replicating, self-financing portfolio uses riskless bonds or a single riskless bank account. We derive option price formulas and extend our analysis to the term structure of interest rates by deriving the pricing of zero-coupon bonds, forward contracts, and futures contracts. We identify a necessary condition for the unified model to support a perpetual derivative. Discrete binomial pricing under the unified model is also developed. In every scenario analyzed, we show that the unified model simplifies to the standard Black-Scholes-Merton pricing under specific limits and provides pricing in the Bachelier model limit. We note that the Bachelier limit within the unified model allows for positive riskless rates. The unified model prompts us to speculate on the possibility of a mixed multiplicative and additive deflator model for risk-neutral option pricing.