Chan N.H., Wong H.Y. Simulation Techniques in Financial Risk Management

Statistics in Practice. A John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2006, - 230 pages.
The book comprises three parts.
Part one consists of the first three chapters. After introducing the motivations of simulation in Chapter 1, basic ideas of Wiener processes and Ito’s calculus are introduced in 2nd and 3rd chapters. The reason for this inclusion is that many students have experienced difficulties in this area because they lack the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of these topics. We try to introduce these topics a t an operational level so that readers can immediately appreciate the complexity and importance of stochastic calculus and its relationship with simulations. This will pave the way for a smooth transition to option pricing and Greeks in later chapters. For readers familiar with these topics, this part can be used as a review.
Chapters 4 to 6 comprise the second part of the book. This part constitutes the main core of an introductory course in risk management. It covers standard topics in a traditional course in simulation, but at a much higher and succinct level. Technical details are left in the references, but important ideas are explained in a conceptual manner. Examples are also given throughout to illustrate the use of these techniques in risk management. By introducing simulations this way, both students with strong theoretical background and students with strong practical motivations get excited about the subject early on.
The remaining chapters 7 to 10 constitute part three of the book. Here, more advanced and exotic topics of simulations in financial engineering and risk management are introduced. One distinctive feature in these chapters is the inclusion of case studies. Many of these cases have strong practical bearings such as pricing of exotic options, simulations of Greeks in hedging, and the use of Bayesian ideas to assess the impact of jumps. By means of these examples, it is hoped that readers can acquire a firsthand knowledge about the importance of simulations and apply them to their work.