14 ARTICLES9 SUBJECTS
Long-form writing on quantitative finance and the machinery underneath it: how the models are built, where they break, and what survives honest testing. Every figure is computed rather than sketched, and there is not a stock tip anywhere on the site.
01THE INDEX
Option structure, risk measurement, portfolio construction, machine learning, and the analysis that sits underneath all of it. Indian market data turns up often as a worked example because it is unusually clean and unusually well documented, but the method is the subject, and the method travels.
Portfolio Management
Build a portfolio for cash flow rather than headline yield: duration and reinvestment, yield traps, REITs and InvITs, and stress-testing the income itself.
16 MIN
Portfolio Management
How to turn liquidity, PMI and yield-curve data into modest factor tilts, with guardrails, honest measurement, and the case that timing often fails.
13 MIN
Risk Management
How Monte Carlo VaR works end to end: covariance, Cholesky shocks, full revaluation, fat tails, convergence, backtesting and expected shortfall.
17 MIN
Technical Analysis
How RSI and MACD are computed, what combining them can and cannot add, and how to test a confluence rule against overfitting, costs and data snooping.
16 MIN
Quantitative Analysis
How pairs trading works, why cointegration beats correlation, how half-life and z-score thresholds set the trade, and why costs and breaks decide the result.
14 MIN
Options & Trading
How butterfly option structures actually work: the payoff shape, why iron and long butterflies are the same trade, and the honest risk in a broken wing.
11 MIN
Options & Income
How credit spreads and iron condors work, what the premium compensates you for, the margin reality, and the payoff shape that catches option sellers out.
9 MIN
Machine Learning
Applying machine learning to equity selection: why cross-validation breaks on time series, where data leakage hides, and when a linear model is better.
9 MIN
Options & Hedging
How to hedge an equity portfolio with index options: sizing the hedge, what protective puts and collars actually cost, and when not to bother at all.
9 MIN
Risk Management
Why drawdowns are harder to recover than they look, what Value at Risk does and does not tell you, and how to size positions so a bad month stays survivable.
10 MIN
Portfolio Management
How diversification actually creates value, what the efficient frontier shows, and why mean-variance optimisation produces portfolios nobody should hold.
9 MIN
Quantitative Analysis
How quantitative analysis works: handling market data properly, the statistics that earn their place, factor models, and the four ways a backtest lies to you.
10 MIN
Technical Analysis
Technical analysis explained honestly: what the charts actually show, which claims survive testing, and how to check whether an indicator works at all.
10 MIN
Fundamental Analysis
Fundamental analysis in practice: which financial statement to trust, what the ratios really answer, and the governance red flags that precede most failures.
9 MIN
END OF SCHEDULE
02 ONE DIAGRAM, FOUR ARGUMENTS
The same three hundred points of index, priced four different ways. Every number below is expiry arithmetic on a 24,000 index with thirty days left, so the shapes are the shapes you would actually get. Keep scrolling and the curve rebuilds itself.
01 One call, one decision
Buy the 24,000 call for 210. Below the strike it expires worthless, so the left half of the payoff is flat: you lose the premium and not a point more. Above the strike every index point is a point of profit, which is why the right half is a straight ray with nothing above it. The whole trade sits in that asymmetry. You bought a floor, you paid 210 for it, and the line does not cross zero until 24,210.
02 Sell the tail you do not want
Keep the long 24,000 call and sell the 24,300 against it for 90. The debit falls from 210 to 120, the floor rises, and breakeven drops to 24,120. What you gave up is everything above 24,300, so the ray becomes a step. This is the first structure where both your maximum loss and your maximum profit are numbers you chose in advance rather than numbers the market hands you afterwards.
03 Two spreads, one range
Put the 23,600 / 23,800 put spread and the 24,200 / 24,400 call spread on together and collect 105. The payoff flattens into a plateau: you keep the credit anywhere between 23,800 and 24,200, and you lose 95 outside the wings. It looks like a high-probability trade because the flat part is wide. The shape does not tell you how often the index visits the edges, and that is the part that decides whether the trade was any good.
04 Pay less, aim narrower
Buy the 23,700 call, sell two of the 24,000, buy the 24,300 back. Net debit 70. The wings cancel both tails flat and the short pair pulls the middle up into a spike worth 230 at exactly 24,000. Best reward per rupee of risk on this page and the narrowest target on this page, which is the same sentence said twice. That is the trade in one picture, and it is why the shape is worth drawing before the ticket is written.
One dataset / five forms
Keep scrolling. The forty-eight dots never change value and never get replaced. They only move, and each arrangement makes a different claim true and a different claim invisible. That is the whole of quantitative analysis, compressed into one figure.
01Scatter
Forty-eight trading sessions of index returns. Nothing is aggregated yet, nothing is smoothed. This is the only view where you can still point at a single day and say what happened on it.
x: trading session / y: daily return
Quantitative Analysis in Finance02Line
Compound the same forty-eight numbers in order and the scatter becomes a path. Nothing was added. The line is a claim about sequence, and sequence is the one thing the next three views throw away.
x: trading session / y: cumulative growth
An Introduction to Technical Analysis03Histogram
Each dot walks to its bin and stacks. Now you can see that the fat left tail is three sessions, not a mood. Value at Risk is read off this picture, which is why the bin width is never an innocent choice.
x: daily return / y: count of sessions
Risk Management Essentials04Density
The bars become a kernel density and the observations fall to a rug beneath. Smoothing bought continuity and spent honesty: the bandwidth is now doing work that no session ever voted for.
x: daily return / y: estimated density
Credit Spreads and Iron Condors05Contour
Plot each session against the one before it. The ring is the joint distribution at 1.6 standard deviations. Correlation is only ever a statement about this shape, and a portfolio is only ever a bet on it.
x: previous return / y: this return
Portfolio Construction and DiversificationReduced motion is on, so the figure is held at its histogram form and all five readings are listed together.
The shape of the whole
Every article cites the others where the argument genuinely needs them, which is why the map has a shape rather than a spoke. Hover any node and only that article's own connections stay lit, so you can read one argument's reach without the rest of the graph shouting over it.
01 / Nodes
Sized by how much it has to say. Nothing here is a stub or a summary of somebody else's post: each one is a complete treatment you can start from.
02 / Clusters
Quantitative methods, options structures, risk and portfolio, market analysis. The grouping is editorial rather than decorative: it is the order I would actually teach these in.
03 / Edges
Every edge is a citation inside the published text, not a related-posts widget. Thicker edges mean an article leans on its neighbour more than once. Hover any node to light its neighbourhood.
04 / The point
Risk management is not a separate subject from portfolio construction, and neither makes sense without the pricing. Start anywhere. The map tells you where to go next.
Edge weight links between the pairClusters methods, options, risk, analysis
Reduced motion is on, so the map is drawn complete and the hover highlighting still works.
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03 AUTHOR
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