Financial Modeling and Analysis

• Analyzing and Modeling Financial Data
• Rapidly Deploying Financial Applications
• Why Use MATLAB
• Introduction to MATLAB in Finance

Introduction to MATLAB in Finance

MATLAB is an interactive, extensible software development environment that offers high-performance numerical computation, data analysis, and visualization capabilities as well as application development tools. Traditional or spreadsheet programming involves tedious, time-consuming tasks such as declaring, data typing, sizing, and memory allocation. MATLAB performs those tasks for you. In addition, MATLAB is matrix-based and eliminates the need to write nested loops in many cases, leaving you free to write expressions that reflect the way you think of problems. You do not need to switch tools, convert files, or rewrite applications.

The MATLAB GUI builder tool, GUIDE, lets you easily design your application interface. GUIDE's customizable design palette offers all the drag-and-drop options you need to create an application interface. Click on image to see enlarged view.

With its more than 600 mathematical and statistical functions, MATLAB gives you immediate access to high-performance numerical computing. This functionality is extended with interactive graphical capabilities for easily creating plots, images, surfaces, and volumetric representations. MATLAB graphics can be exported into many file formats including TIF and JPEG for use in presentations and report.

MATLAB offers powerful math and graphics capabilities. Click on image to see enlarged view.

The M-file Performance Profiler helps you identify the functions in your application that take the most time to execute. Click on image to see enlarged view.

Working with Excel

Spreadsheet Link™ EX lets you work in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets while MATLAB does the calculations and creates the graphics in the background. Excel and Excel add-in models, using VBA, often take a considerable amount of time trying to solve large-scale problems. In many cases the number of iterations has to be limited when running the models in order to get a result.

By using MATLAB as a computational engine, you can quickly run larger-scale simulations to get more accurate results. Customer benchmarks have shown that using MATLAB as a computation engine for Excel can reduce simulation times by greater than 95%. This gives you the ability to confidently assess your risk in a matter of minutes, not hours or days.

With the MATLAB Import Wizard, you can easily import many different file formats, including data from Excel.

MATLAB is the computational engine that delivers both the numerical and graphical results. Click on image to see enlarged view.

Using MATLAB® Builder™ EX, you can also deploy your MATLAB algorithms as Excel add-ins, even to end-users without MATLAB.

Working with Other Development Languages

You can call your existing C/C++ code directly from MATLAB. You can also deploy your MATLAB code as a library or component to C/C++, Java, or any .NET language using the MATLAB deployment products. These components can be distributed royalty-free. MATLAB also lets you interact with other financial tools. The MATLAB solution reduces your reliance on costly black box solutions and specialty software.

Use MATLAB Builder JA or MATLAB® Builder™ NE to integrate your MATLAB code into a Web application. Click on image to see enlarged view.