The Mathematics of Finance for High Schoolers

Paul Wilmott studied mathematics at St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he also received his D.Phil. He is the author of Paul Wilmott Introduces Quantitative Finance (Wiley 2007), Paul Wilmott On Quantitative Finance (Wiley 2006), Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance (Wiley 2009), The Money Formula (with David Orrell) (Wiley 2017) and other financial textbooks. He has written over 100 research articles on finance and mathematics. Paul Wilmott was a founding partner of the volatility arbitrage hedge fund Caissa Capital which managed $170 million. His responsibilities included forecasting, derivatives pricing, and risk management. Paul is the proprietor of wilmott.com, the popular quantitative finance community website, and the quant magazine Wilmott. He is the creator of the Certificate in Quantitative Finance, cqf.com, and the President of the CQF Institute, cqfinstitute.org.Paul Wilmott has been called "cult derivatives lecturer" by the Financial Times and "financial mathematics guru" by the BBC.

It's never too early to start learning about finance. But the mathematics covered in this book is not the mathematics of balancing your check book, or splitting a restaurant bill among friends, some of whom had the set menu, and others the specials. The mathematics here is an introduction to the subject known as mathematical finance, quantitative finance or financial engineering. It's an introduction to the higher level of mathematics used in banks and hedge funds, in valuing complex financial instruments, in allocating money to different assets, and in measuring and managing risk.This book is for high-school children who are confident in their mathematics. They do not have to be advanced or even top of their class. But they do have to be comfortable with learning new concepts.The book starts with a chapter on the history of money, banks, bubbles and crashes. Then there's the jargon. Bankers do like their jargon, but it's all very straightforward. Then there's a chapter on careers in finance. There are jobs that just require familiarity with spreadsheets, then there are jobs that require a degree in mathematics or computer science. A chapter on the basic mathematics is next. That's a little bit, but only a little bit, about the exponential function, logarithms and simple ideas in probability. The last four chapters are on fixed income (that's just putting money in the bank), shares, portfolios, and finally the financial instruments known as options.