November 11th 2003 saw a landmark event take place in London. As the first conference designed for quants by quants the Quantitative Finance Review 2003, moved away from the anonymous bazaars that have become the norm, and instead delivered valuable information to market practitioners with the greatest interest. The roster of speakers was phenomenal, ranging from founding fathers to bright young things, discussing the latest developments, with a specific emphasis on the burgeoning field of credit derivatives. You really had to be there. Until now, at least.
The Best of Wilmott 1:...

A compilation of the most respected authorities in financial engineering
Based around a conference on financial modeling held in Milan in December 1999, New Directions in Mathematical Finance brings together the leading names in quantitative finance to discuss the most current modeling techniques in a variety of areas of financial engineering. The contributions featured in this volume are all new items, based on each speaker's topic of presentation at the convention. Editors Paul Wilmott and Henrik Rasmussen include an introduction which pulls together the themes of the book.

Since around the turn of the millennium there has been a general acceptance that one of the more practical improvements one may make in the light of the shortfalls of the classical Black-Scholes model is to replace the underlying source of randomness, a Brownian motion, by a Levy process. Working with Levy processes allows one to capture desirable distributional characteristics in the stock returns. In addition, recent work on Levy processes has led to the understanding of many probabilistic and analytical properties, which make the processes attractive as mathematical tools. At the same...