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Finance

Education & Academic

Is High Debt Bad for Economic Growth?

Recent events have brought to light that a famous research paper by noted economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published in the 2010 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series contained serious programming, methodological, and statistical errors. Their paper claimed to show that there is a sharp decline in GDP whenever an economy reaches the 90% debt level. Policy makers at the European Commission and in Washington paid heed to these results and formulated real policies such as "debt stabilization" in Europe and the sequester in the USA that have led to sustained high unemployment and weakened economies. But subsequent analyses have shown that no such 90% cliff exists.
Education & Academic

Announcing Wolfram Finance Platform 2 with Report Generation

Last year we released Wolfram Finance Platform, beginning a new chapter in the way the financial world uses Wolfram technologies. Today we're pleased to announce Wolfram Finance Platform 2, which expands and improves the groundwork begun by our first version. One set of new capabilities that Finance Platform 2 introduces is a major enhancement to the way financial analysis is deployed: automated report generation. Report Generation allows you to create documents quickly and easily using Wolfram Finance Platform documents. Since Report Generation is built on Finance Platform's Computable Document Format interface, it's easy to add it into your normal workflow. Data for the report can come from a variety of sources, such as the result of a computation, a database query, or Finance Platform's integrated computation data source or integrated market data streams. Portfolio performance, risk analyses, and market/economic outlook are just a few of the applications that can take advantage of Report Generation.
Education & Academic

Graph Theory and Finance in Mathematica

Diversification is a way for investors to reduce investment risk. The asset values within a well-diversified portfolio do not move up and down in perfect synchrony. Instead, when some assets' values move up, others tend to move down, evening out large, portfolio-wide fluctuations and thus reducing risk. A simple way to explore diversification within the stock market is to invest in stocks from different sectors or different geographic regions. Beyond stocks, investors can consider diversification in different asset classes such as bonds, commodities, or real estate. The following chart shows the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrials indices, indicators of return that move in sync with each other. You can download the Computable Document Format (CDF) version of this post below to execute this code yourself.
Education & Academic

Announcing Wolfram Finance Platform

One key project for me recently has been the new Wolfram Finance Platform, which I am pleased to announce today. This is a major new initiative for us to create the ultimate computation environment for finance. It builds on our existing computational technology with extra capabilities and professional support services. As part of this, I spent some time interviewing finance customers in the city of London about what they liked and didn't like about Mathematica, what they wanted, and why some of their colleagues didn't use it.
Education & Academic

Preview the Ultimate Computation Environment–Now for Finance

Computation has always been at the center of what Wolfram does... but finance hasn't been, at least not until now. In recent months, the team has been taking our ultimate computation environment and specializing it for finance. It's amazing some of the results our technology readily achieves in this domain--whether it's a user-customizable market data explorer of Bloomberg data feeds, financial derivative valuations with GPUs, or automated reporting with interactivity. We're previewing the Wolfram Finance Platform at our March 27 virtual conference with an introduction from Conrad Wolfram. Join us! This virtual event will be held on Tuesday, March 27, at the following times: * 8–11:30am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT); 1–4:30pm British Summer Time (BST) * Repeat session: 1–4:30pm EDT; 6–9:30pm BST Virtual seats are limited--see the event schedule and register today!
Education & Academic

The Ongoing Stock Market Crash

The ongoing gyrations of the stock market over the past few months have spread panic not just throughout the markets, but into the rest of the economy and the political sphere. There are some who assert that this is due to the recent downgrade of the American credit rating by Standard & Poor's (S&P), but an analysis with Mathematica suggests that other factors may be at play. Using the FinancialBond function for a zero-coupon continuously compounding bond price, we discover the inverse relation between bond prices and yields (y) given below. As the bond price increases, the yield y decreases. As bonds are bought, their prices go up and the corresponding yields drop. Looking at the U.S. yield curve using Wolfram|Alpha at the end of July and eight weeks later below, the yields on long-term 10-year treasury bonds have dropped from 2.82% to 1.84%, which is a historic 50-year low. This shows that investors are now more likely to buy long-term U.S. government debt, which is puzzling behavior if they are panicked by the S&P downgrade.
Education & Academic

Financial Strategies with Mathematica Workshop and Seminar in New York on September 15

Mathematica 8 added a slew of powerful finance functions to its already large list of capabilities when it was released last November. To help highlight some of these features as well as assist those who want to use them, Wolfram Research is presenting both a finance workshop and a free seminar at the Club Quarters, Wall Street hotel in New York City on September 15.
Education & Academic

Exploring America’s Debt Problem

It has been a roller coaster ride for the stock market lately. On August 1, the United States government avoided a default by a last minute deal to raise the debt limit. A few days later, we witnessed the first ever downgrade of U.S. credit by Standard & Poor's. Using Mathematica's TradingChart command, we can witness the stock market's immediate negative reaction to the downgrade. Note: Mouse over the chart to see the daily open, high, low, and closing price of the S&P 500 index.