Introduction

The main goals and overall approach of this book are presented in the introduction. One key objective is to obtain an accurate description of financial time series in the range from a few hours to one year. A second objective is to present the implication of the selected models in the domain of market risk evaluation and in option pricing. One methodological point is to clearly separate the statistical analyzes from the construction of the processes, following the approach used in physics and in many natural sciences. The general discussion presents the similarities and differences between the construction of models in finance and in physics, and the points that set this book apart from the existing literature. Finally, a companion web site is introduced. This site presents much more statistics and graphs for a deeper analysis of the empirical time series and processes.