Introduction to financial derivatives

The material in this Open Press textbook originates from a course that I have taught at Tilburg University for more than ten years, until my retirement in 2016. The course was designed to provide students with an introduction to continuous-time models that are used to analyze derivative contracts in finance and insurance, as part of the MSc program in Quantitative Finance and Actuarial Science. Students in the QFAS master’s program come in from the bachelor’s program in Econometrics and Operations Research at Tilburg University, but also from comparable programs at universities elsewhere in the Netherlands as well as from abroad. The intended audience of the course therefore consists of students with a solid background in standard calculus, linear algebra, and probability, but not necessarily with prior exposure to stochastic calculus