A release of RQuantLib is now on CRAN and in Debian. It contains a lot of new code contributed by Terry Leitch over a number of pull requests. See below for full details but the changes focus on Fixed Income and Fixed Income Derivatives, and cover swap, discount curves, swaptions and more.

Are Lower Private Equity Returns The New Normal? by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt – Center for Economic and Policy Research U.S. private equity fundraising had its best year ever in 2015 — raising $185 billion.

R has some good tools for importing data from spreadsheets, among them the readxl package for Excel and the googlesheets package for Google Sheets.

Is A Second Passport Only For The Ultra-Wealthy? by Simon Black, Sovereign Man When you think about ‘insurance’, chances are you probably think about term life, home insurance, or liability insurance.

Looking at two bank reports on the same topic can often yield interesting results. There are times when bank research is best viewed from the standpoint of how their analysis does or does not correlate with one another.

“…[W]e are suspicious of rapid cognition.

Once you’ve earned your travel rewards, it’s time to cash them in for a free flight. Some rewards programs are confusing to navigate, though. AwardAce shows you how to book your rewards travel, step by step, depending on the airline. We’ve told you about AwardAce before.

The recent move in LIBOR seems to have caught Wall Street off guard. At a time when many analysts and economists are predicting that central banks around the world will be unable to hike interest rates for the foreseeable future, LIBOR rates have jumped over the past few weeks.

Data Science is all about getting access to interesting data, and it is really nice when some kind soul not only points out an interesting data set but also makes it easy for you to access it.

One approach to trading which has been puzzling me lately, is to sit and wait for opportunities. We can define a strong directional move as a 5% move over 3 days for instance. However, that’s not likely to work for different markets (think futures).