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Quantitative Trading book

Joined
5/2/06
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Anyone reads this book yet? From the few pages I could view on Amazon, the author has an interesting background and it seems very practical.

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Not Good

I browsed through the book at B&N. The content is superficial. He spends about a quarter of the book discussing the motivation for "quant" trading. There are some simple examples in Matlab. If I remember correctly, there is a brief introduction to the Kelly Criterion. The book looks like an advertisement for his paid trade recommendation emails.
 
I was looking for some treatment on the topics of mean reversion, regime switching strategies as well as other technical aspects on building up such an automatic quant trading platform. This book does touch on the subjects but judging from the TOC, very slightly.
Besides, most books focus on equity, stock picking i.e every Joe's favourite asset class. I still haven't come across anything more complex such as credit derivatives index arbitrage, relative values strategies. I assume such topics remain exclusive to prop desks, not something people can do at home.
 
If I remember correctly, there is a brief introduction to the Kelly Criterion.

An information theory based approach to the markets drawing on Shannon's work in this field. This was amongst the first things which got me interested in quantitative methods in finance.
 
What is the first book a new quant should read to get overall picture of Quant developer and their role in finance?
 
Hi Andy!<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
The book is good for quantitative enthusiastics (like me) that want to understand the basics of quant trading. <o:p></o:p>
The most interesting chapter is called Special Topics and you can find the basics of cointegration plus some nice examples of cointegrated pairs (AUD/CAD and GLD/GDX). Also the MatLab code is well written and easy to understand.<o:p></o:p>
 
I read that book a couple of weeks back. Its a nice little book for the purpose starting out as an individual trader. You wont find a complete description of strategies, though he does talk about pairs trading and a few more, only briefly. But then again this is no encyclopedia for trading strategies. It teaches you stuff, that as an individual trader should be aware of. He uses MATLAB and Excel for illustrating purposes.
 
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