I assume exotic derivatives (binary, asian, barrier options...) and structured notes that predominantly use above said derivatives (autocallables, barrier reverse convertibles, accumulators etc.)

Thank you.

No matter how much I try to understand the financial system, there seems no end to the nomenclature.

Do you or others know of any good references that help navigate this?

Patrick Boyle, early in his YouTube career, made some videos on exotic options. This is a lot more engaging and possibly more informative than reading Hull.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHC72UlhAthBEEAhoQwPdDaL_...

Really depends how deep you want to go.

For a structured products introduction you may take a look at this one: https://sspa.ch/en/book/

It's a very simple book, very high level, but explains the most popular structured products in a very simple manner. If you can read a payoff diagram, then this is the simplest intro.

Looking at their website though, they seem to have some nice online material there also. For example this explains the 5 most popular products, and perhaps that's good enough for an introduction (really these 5 products cover 90% of the market anyway, though there's no limit to how exotic some bespoke structures can get): https://sspa.ch/en/lab/?underlying=CH0012221716&final_fixing...

In case you're interested in getting to get to learn about them on a deeper level I would recommend https://www.amazon.com/Exotic-Options-Hybrids-Structuring-Pr.... This book explains not only the products, but also the pricing dynamics and hedging too.

And just a small gem I found recently about volatility trading:https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306680584072?chn=ps&_ul=GB&_trkpa...

Despite its appalling Amazon reviews I consider this book to be a real gem when it comes to the introduction to vol trading (basically dynamic hedging of equity derivatives)

Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives by Hull, that's the classic.

Not sure how exotic he gets but likely the page that sells this book will have other options books.

I think there's one by Espen Hauge about exotics.

Relevant book by Nassim Taleb (before his big break) is Dynamic Hedging, which tells you what to do with your option risk once you have it.

Would you mind sharing which course it was? Is it available online by any chance?

Unfortunately it was a course at my university, and in Swedish. But it wouldn't surprise me if there are similar courses online.

I highly recommend visiting the niagara parks power station museum on the Canadian side - they have a very interesting exhibition of the old power plant. You can even go down to the old tunnel and walk through it to see how the water was diverted back into the river, fascinating stuff.

The Welland canal is also very interesting. There's something really cool about seeing a large ship moving _on_ a bridge while driving under that same bridge with a car. Also, the city of Welland has some nice bike trails iirc.

Is that the one not too far from the statue of Tesla donated by the Serbian government? I vaguely remember visiting it a good few years ago...

Yes, I think so, it's right next to the parking lot. I visited it about 3 years ago, but back then the tunnel was not accessible yet, it is now.

Also, not sure if this is true, but our tour guide told us that Tesla himself actually never set foot on the Canadian side of the falls.

A bit of off topic, but recently I started learning F# because my new team at work uses it heavily, and even though I love writing in C# and even though the latest C# features are really nice (especially love patter matching), I wish now C# didn’t have the curly braces and semicolons at all, and used instead indentation based grouping like F# and Python does. That is practically all I wish I had in C#… and discriminated unions, but let’s be honest, what are the chances of that happening? ;)

F# is an hidden gem, iteration 5 278.

I think it stays niche because it’s targeted at people knowing the dotnet ecosystem but most of those people reason a lot in OOP/imperative because well, they work with C#.

But it’s amazing to me that F# is still evolving and cutting edge after more than two decades of being extremely niche. You’d think Microsoft would abandon it or let it rot but no. Though I think F# is in fact the laboratory for new language features for C#.

pythonnet works, we use it in a pretty large (Python) codebase, but I’m much more excited about https://github.com/tonybaloney/CSnakes, which allows using Python in a proper statically typed language - C#.

On a slightly unrelated note, I am absolutely thrilled about tonybaloney’s other project[1] that automatically generates C# bindings for python. Can’t wait for it to support complete class mappings and finally I will be able to use python ‘type-safely’.

[1] https://github.com/tonybaloney/CSnakes

I’m curious why was this downvoted, sounds like an interesting idea to me.

Seems to be a reference to the debate on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

I’ve seen it used for OTC option pricing - there’s no liquid market, so you are more of a market maker than a market taker.

Black Scholes is not used for any otc option pricing, except perhaps to provide an instantaneous estimate to get in the ballpark, but no one would use it for the final price.

I always thought that in a highly automated world, reducing the mandated working hours would be the solution to bring prosperity and peace, but there are some obvious problems with that. For example, in a global economy, nations compete with each other, and for developing nations, an average german producing for fewer hours, but consuming the same or even more resources, would be a great competitive advantage. For something like this to truly work I think it would have to be rolled out globally, or certain tariffs would have to be in place against nations that don’t follow the practice - and let’s be honest, certain nations do much worse things today to gain competitive advantage, and really nobody cares, most people love cheap stuff, however morally questionable the source is.