Advanced Futures and Options

Catalog description

This course consists of three parts. The first section of the course is a detailed examination of the pricing and hedging of option contracts, with particular emphasis on the application of these concepts to the design of derivatives instruments and trading strategies. The first part of this section is a review and re-examination of materials covered in the basic course, but with greater rigor and depth of coverage. The emphasis in the second part of this first section is on trading applications and risk management. The second section of the course is designed to provide a broad exposure to the subject of interest rate derivative products, both swaps and options. The last section of the course deals with recent innovations in the derivatives markets such as exotic options, credit derivatives and catastrophe derivatives. In the first section of the course, the discussion of trading strategies is in the context of the management of the risk of a derivatives book. The topics covered in the second part of the course include the relationship of swaps to other fixed income contracts such as futures contracts and forward rate agreements, valuation and hedging of swaps, building the yield curve, and valuation and hedging of interest rate options, with particular reference to caps, floors and swaptions, and modeling the term structure of interest rates. The third section of the course deals with non-standard option contracts such as exotic options and options on new underlying instruments such as credit, weather and insurance derivatives. Pre-requisite: Foundations of Finance Fulfillment: This course satisfies BUSF Finance elective; BUSM Non-Marketing elective; IMB Business elective.