Financial Services

Introducing 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. The customizable design palette of GUIDE 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 Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), often take a considerable amount of time trying to solve large-scale problems. In many cases, the number of iterations have to be limited when running the models to get a result.

By using MATLAB as a computational engine, you can quickly run larger scale simulations to get more accurate results. Customer bench marks have shown that using MATLAB as a computation engine for Excel can reduce simulation times by greater than 95%. This helps you 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.

Working with C/C++ and VB Code

You can call your existing C/C++ code directly from MATLAB. The new add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio offers a seamless interface to Visual Studio. You can also convert your MATLAB code to C/C++ code using the C/C++ Compiler Suite. The converted C code is freely distributable. MATLAB lets you interact with other financial tools, such as SAS and Crystal Ball. MATLAB reduces your reliance on costly black box solutions and specialty software.

You can edit, run, and compile MATLAB applications from within Visual C++. Click on image to see enlarged view.