Nerds on Wall Street - Math, Machines and Wired Markets

The Simple Truth About Quantitative Trading

Rishi K Narang

Praise for

Inside the Black Box

"In Inside the Black Box: The Simple Truth About Quantitative Trading, Rishi Narang demystifies quantitative trading. His explanation and classification of alpha will enlighten even a seasoned veteran."
?Blair Hull, Founder, Hull Trading & Matlock Trading

"Rishi provides a comprehensive overview of quantitative investing that should prove useful both to those allocating money to quant strategies and those interested in becoming quants themselves. Rishi's experience as a well-respected quant fund of funds manager and his solid relationships with many practitioners provide ample useful material for his work."
?Peter Muller, Head of Process Driven Trading, Morgan Stanley

"A very readable book bringing much needed insight into a subject matter that is not often covered. Provides a framework and guidance that should be valuable to both existing investors and those looking to invest in this area for the first time. Many quants should also benefit from reading this book."
?Steve Evans, Managing Director of Quantitative Trading, Tudor Investment Corporation

"Without complex formulae, Narang, himself a leading practitioner, provides an insightful taxonomy of systematic trading strategies in liquid instruments and a framework for considering quantitative strategies within a portfolio. This guide enables an investor to cut through the hype and pretense of secrecy surrounding quantitative strategies."
?Ross Garon, Managing Director, Quantitative Strategies, S.A.C. Capital Advisors, L.P.

"Inside the Black Box is a comprehensive, yet easy read. Rishi Narang provides a simple framework for understanding quantitative money management and proves that it is not a black box but rather a glass box for those inside."
?Jean-Pierre Aguilar, former founder and CEO, Capital Fund Management

"This book is great for anyone who wants to understand quant trading, without digging in to the equations. It explains the subject in intuitive, economic terms."
?Steven Drobny, founder, Drobny Global Asset Management, and author, Inside the House of Money

"Rishi Narang does an excellent job demystifying how quants work, in an accessible and fun read. This book should occupy a key spot on anyone's bookshelf who is interested in understanding how this ever increasing part of the investment universe actually operates."

?Matthew S. Rothman, PhD, Global Head of Quantitative Equity Strategies Barclays Capital

E-commerce Get It Right!

Just released and written in a no holds barred style… This new and exclusive Step-by-Step E-commerce Guide, will show you everything you need to know about achieving success with your own e-commerce website and business. Whether you're an e-commerce Start-Up or have an Existing e-commerce website that is struggling to make a profit, this book is literally packed full of the latest tried and tested insider secrets, key strategies and practical tips, proven over a 10-year period to generate sales and profits at explosive levels.

Did you know...

97% of e-commerce websites (shopping websites) make 0 profits in their first 3 years online. Such is the steep learning curve and skill set required to build an e-commerce website that can dominate your product category, market or niche. Be Part of Elite 3% with E-commerce Get It Right!

Inside You'll Learn...

• How to Build & Launch a Super-Charged E-commerce Website & Business Fast!
• How to Generate High Quality, Ready-To-Buy Visitors!
• How to Convert More of These Visitors Into Paying Customers!
• How to Transform a Struggling E-commerce Website!
• How to Fast Track Your Learning & Avoid the Pitfalls!

...and Everything Else In Between for E-commerce Success!

E-commerce is a booming industry that is growing at a rapid rate and many e-commerce businesses are taking market share from traditional offline retail businesses. Now is the time to take the opportunity of an accelerated start-up regardless of the economy, your background, age or experience. You'll see how to quickly get accomplished in owning and running your own e-commerce website and business with E-commerce Get It Right!

Within this book, we are going to break down and analyze the four critical steps required to get explosive E-commerce Sales & Profits - within 30 Days of launch and beyond.

• Step 1 - Get Started: Setting Up Your E-commerce Success Formula!
• Step 2 - Get Sales: Build & Launch Your E-commerce Website - Fast!
• Step 3 - Get Hiring: How To Find A Kick Ass-Web Designer!
• Step 4 - Get More Sales: Marketing to Hordes of Hungry, Ready-to-Buy Ecommerce Customers!

We'll also cover building your e-commerce success foundation, hiring a kick-ass web designer, how to drive masses of traffic to your website, how to lower bounce and cart abandonment, and how to increase conversion rates (sales), all using simple and common sense yet powerful e-commerce strategies!

Nearly every retailer in the Internet Retailers' Top 500 has an affiliate marketing program. Now free affiliate networks, automation software, and pay-for-performance compensation models are making it easy for small businesses to take advantage of this marketing tool. In the popular An Hour a Day format, this guide features a detailed, real-world, task-based approach to developing, launching, and managing a successful affiliate marketing program. It explores market research, determining payment models and reporting guidelines, recruiting affiliates, crafting appropriate communications, and much more.

• Affiliate marketing programs help boost marketing efforts without incurring excessive costs; this Hour a Day guide provides everything merchants, business owners, and those charged with managing an affiliate program need to know
• Offers a modern, real-world, step-by-step guide to researching, launching, managing, and optimizing a successful affiliate marketing program
• Covers social media; creating policies; working with feeds, coupons, widgets, and video; creating compelling content; handling partners who are not meeting goals; and much more

It’s clear from the current turbulence on Wall Street that the inner workings of its most complex transactions are poorly understood. Wall Street deals parse risk using intricate legal terminology that is difficult to translate into an analytical model. Reverse Engineering Deals on Wall Street: A Step-By-Step Guide takes readers through a detailed methodology of deconstructing the public deal documentation of a modern Wall Street transaction and applying the deconstructed elements to create a fully dynamic model that can be used for risk and investment analysis.

Appropriate for the current market climate, an actual residential mortgage backed security (RMBS) transaction is taken from prospectus to model by the end of the book. Step by step, Allman walks the reader through the reversing process with textual excerpts from the prospectus and discussions on how it directly transfers to a model. Each chapter begins with a discussion of concepts with exact references to an example prospectus, followed by a section called "Model Builder," in which Allman translates the theory into a fully functioning model for the example deal. Also included is valuable VBA code and detailed explanation that shows proper valuation methods including loan level amortization and full trigger modeling.

Aside from investment analysis this text can help anyone who wants to keep track of the competition, learn from others public transactions, or set up a system to audit one’s own models.

The mortgage meltdown: what went wrong and how do we fix it?

Owning a home can bestow a sense of security and independence. But today, in a cruel twist, many Americans now regard their homes as a source of worry and dashed expectations. How did everything go haywire? And what can we do about it now?

In The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Mortgage and Credit Markets, renowned finance expert James Barth offers a comprehensive examination of the mortgage meltdown. Together with a team of economists at the Milken Institute, he explores the shock waves that have rippled through the entire financial sector and the real economy. Deploying an incredibly detailed and extensive set of data, the book offers in-depth analysis of the mortgage meltdown and the resulting worldwide financial crisis. This authoritative volume explores what went wrong in every critical area, including securitization, loan origination practices, regulation and supervision, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, leverage and accounting practices, and of course, the rating agencies. The authors explain the steps the government has taken to address the crisis thus far, arguing that we have yet to address the larger issues.

• Offers a comprehensive examination of the mortgage market meltdown and its reverberations throughout the financial sector and the real economy
• Explores several important issues that policymakers must address in any future reshaping of financial market regulations
• Addresses how we can begin to move forward and prevent similar crises from shaking the foundations of our financial system

Most emerging markets investment guides focus on financial metrics, but fail to provide the reader with new and relevant insights into the history of the countries, the views of the people on the street, and the financial shenanigans that go on behind the scenes, that make for truly informed investing. As a result, despite the growing interest in investing in these markets, investors are often missing key opportunities because they either have incorrect information about a country where they might invest, or simply don't know what questions they should be asking. Where In the World Should I Invest: An Insider's Guide to Making Money Around the Globe is here to help.

Drawing on author Karim Rahemtulla's personal experiences traveling the globe and exploring the capitals where business is transacted, the book outlines the perils, pitfalls, and rewards of investing in "low float" markets.

• The essential resource for taking the right steps in exploring investment opportunities in foreign and emerging markets
• Expert advice from an author with 20 years experience covering emerging markets
• Commentary on the expectations of foreign investors, the fears of investing abroad, how to set up legal offshore accounts, and much more