High Finance - Lecture Notes

Fall, 2008

 

These are some "lecture notes" and related material for a talk I gave recently. The announcement for the talk looked like this:

Speaker: Dr. Tom Carter, Department of Computer Science, California State University, Stanislaus

Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Time: 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Room: P104

Title: Fatal Shore -- Black-Scholes and High Finance

Abstract: This talk will include a derivation/analysis of the Black-Scholes options pricing model. I will also discuss some concerns about the model, potential consequences of the use of such models, and some of the relevance of such models in the current "financial crisis." We seem to have run aground on some "dark shoals" near the shores of high finance . . .


  • Econ102.pdf Deriving and solving the Black-Scholes "options pricing model" (a non-linear PDE). Also contained here is some background discussion on random variables and random walks.

  • Econ102-discussion.pdf Pdf version of some "power point" notes containing some discussion of the assumptions behind the Black-Scholes model, and some related topics . . .

  • TaxiCab.pdf How is the "discrete world" related to the "continuous world"? In particular, looking at "taxicab geometry" . . .

  • Logistic-continuous.pdf More of -- how is the "discrete world" related to the "continuous world"? This time, the discrete vs. the continuous "logistic map" . . .

  • econ101.pdf Some lecture notes from a prior talk, concerning maximum entropy principles, wealth distribution, and power laws . . .

  • social-insurance.html Some notes excerpted from a discussion about regulation, taxes (in particular, dividend taxes), financial institutions, and bailouts past . . .