Shakespearean arbitrage -- Between arbitrage and speculation -- Trading on the limits of learning -- Economy of dreams -- The last dream -- From arbitrage to the gift

For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. In this book, the author examines the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.

Ben Mezrich, author of the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House, returns with an astonishing story of Ivy League hedge-fund cowboys, high stakes, and the Asian underworld. John Malcolm was the ultimate gunslinger in the Wild East, prepared to take on any level of risk in making mind-boggling sums of money. He and his friends were hedge-fund cowboys, living life on the adrenaline-, sex-, and drugs-fueled edge—kids running billion-dollar portfolios, trading information in the back rooms of high-class brothels and at VIP tables in nightclubs across the Far East. Malcolm and his Ivy League-schooled twenty-something colleagues, with their warped sense of morality, created their own economic theory that would culminate in a single deal the likes of which had never been seen before—or since. Ugly Americans is a story of extremes, charged with wealth, nerve, excess, and glamour. A real-life mixture of Liar's Poker and Wall Street, brimming with intense action, romance, underground sex, vivid locales, and exotic characters, Ugly Americans is the untold true story that rocked the financial community.

Econophysics is a newborn field of science bridging economics and physics. A special feature of this new science is the data analysis of high-precision market data. In economics arbitrage opportunity is strictly denied; however, by observing high-precision data we can prove the existence of arbitrage opportunity. Also, financial technology neglects the possibility of market prediction; however, in this book you can find many examples of predicted events. There are other surprising findings. This volume is the proceedings of a workshop on "application of econophysics" at which leading international researchers discussed their most recent results.

This book discusses calendar or seasonal anomalies in worldwide equity markets as well as arbitrage and risk arbitrage. A complete update of US anomalies such as the January turn-of-the year, turn-of-the-month, January barometer, sell in May and go away, holidays, days of the week, options expiry and other effects is given concentrating on the futures markets where these anomalies can be easily applied. Other effects that lend themselves to modified buy and hold cash strategies include the presidential election and factor models based on fundamental anomalies. The ideas have been used successfully by the author in personal and managed accounts and hedge funds.

In recent years, Japan's financial market has seen dramatic changes, in particular the explosive growth of currency trading and the increasing international role of the yen. This book gives a comprehensive overview of this activity. This work is the first non-Japanese language title to examine the prolific rise of Japan's foreign currency exchange market, its idiosyncracies, and its future role in the global economy. It is vital reading for economists and students of Japan-related subjects.

Neoclassical Finance provides a concise and powerful account of the underlying principles of modern finance, drawing on a generation of theoretical and empirical advances in the field. Stephen Ross developed the no arbitrage principle, tying asset pricing to the simple proposition that there are no free lunches in financial markets, and jointly with John Cox he developed the related concept of risk-neutral pricing. In this book Ross makes a strong case that these concepts are the fundamental pillars of modern finance and, in particular, of market efficiency. In an efficient market prices reflect the information possessed by the market and, as a consequence, trading schemes using commonly available information to beat the market are doomed to fail. By stark contrast, the currently popular stance offered by behavioral finance, fueled by a number of apparent anomalies in the financial markets, regards market prices as subject to the psychological whims of investors. But without any appeal to psychology, Ross shows that neoclassical theory provides a simple and rich explanation that resolves many of the anomalies on which behavioral finance has been fixated. Based on the inaugural Princeton Lectures in Finance, sponsored by the Bendheim Center for Finance of Princeton University, this elegant book represents a major contribution to the ongoing debate on market efficiency, and serves as a useful primer on the fundamentals of finance for both scholars and practitioners.