QCF: A filed with Enormous Impact
Articles that help to describe this area, and also argue the worth to the financial community of this mathematical modeling and the quantitative and computational approach are the following. The first article, a survey, addresses the usefulness of mathematical modeling in this area of finance. Several of the responses reported in this 1997 survey reinforce the belief that the demand for individuals with a graduate degree in quantitative and computational finance is expected to continue to be strong. In particular, of the 50 large financial institutions from around the world responding to the survey, 39% reported that quantitative professionals were crucial to the survival of their firm, while another 51% stated that quantitative professionals complemented the rest of the firm. Also, 76% noted that the proportion of quantitative professionals in their firm had increased over the past 15 years, and 71% expected such a proportion to continue to increase. The second and third articles address specific instances of the usefulness of quantitative and computational techniques for the financial markets today. The fourth article addresses the use made by these techniques in rebuilding the Japanese financial markets today.
- "Survey Assessing the Use of Mathematics by Financial Firms" in Journal of Financial Engineering Vol. 6, No. 4, pages 357-362
- "Message From Stockholm: Markets Work" by David R. Henderson in The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 15, 1997, page A22;
- "Money Matters" by C.S.Venkatakrishnan in OR/MS Today, the newsmagazine published by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), April, 1997, pages 28-32; and
- "Trading Places" by Katsushige Sawaki in OR/MS Today, April 1999, pages 36-38.
- "Finance and Economics: an Earthquake in Insurance" in The Economist, February 28, 1998
- "The Fledgling Weather Market Takes Off" by R. Dischel in Applied Derivatives Trading, November 1998.
- "Business is Booming" (a credit derivatives survey) in Credit Risk, A Risk Special Report, April 1999, page 8.
- "Robert Merton Delivers Block Community Lecture" by James Case in SIAM News, Volume 31, Number 7, September 1998, pages 1 and 20.
- "Tracking New Trends in Financial Engineering" by J.Birge and V.Linetsky in Financial Engineering News, February, 1998, Vol. 2, No.1
- "Trading Vast Volumes, Stock Firm Consults Only its Black Box" by Greg Ip in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 16, 1997, page A1
- "Banking on Energy Derivatives" in Risk, April 1999, pages 37-38.
Articles that indicate new directions of growth for application of quantitative and computational finance are the following. The first discusses growth of the use of these risk-reducing financial instruments in the insurance industry; and the second article is the first of a series of articles on the weather markets that have appeared in the trade journal Applied Derivatives Trading (see Appliederivatives.com and Erivativesreview.com). The third is an article that presents results from a recent survey on the market in credit derivatives; the results indicate that there has been a large increase in the use of these derivatives and that this trend is expected to continue. The fourth discusses several ways to enhance the application of the current financial models. The last four contain some specific new trends in the field.