For some, coffee is a big stimulant and for some the ambience that goes with it, the coffee shop. Here is a site that provides the right amount of ambient noise of a coffee shop . Link : Coffitivity

The purpose of the book is to illustrate various asset pricing concepts in a coin tossing world. Imagine a world where there is a money market instrument, an underlying security and various derivatives written on the underlying security. This world has a peculiar feature, i.e., the stock price can move up or down based on a coin toss. So, if one is looking at an option that has expiry 3 units from the current time, there are 8 outcomes of the stock price based on 8 coin toss realizations (HHH,HTH,HHT,HTT,THH,TTH,THT,TTT).

HFT firms profits reportedly have slumped from nearly $5 billion four years ago to $1 billion last year GETCO, the largest HFT player in the U.S.markets profits from HFT shrank 82% last year. Move from Ultra High frequency to Mid frequency strategies might happen as the former gets arbed out. According to a study by TABB Group, HFT is expected to rise to 52% of average daily volume this year.

I have gone through the book so that I can understand the application of compound Poisson process model and the estimation of relevant parameters. The book, as is evident from the title, talks about the math in insurance context. I like “One example” books where a single example is explored in all dimensions throughout the book. This is one such book where the data relating to “Danish fire insurance” is used to illustrate various modeling principles.

I stumbled on to RStudio (an open source IDE ) 2 years ago and felt there was a need for a lot of improvement before I could make a switch from eclipse IDE. As I check out the features of it, I see that there has been a ton of improvement in the features. I went through this book to get a basic overview of all features at once. The RStudio site has a set of documentation pages that looks equally good.