Welcome!
My name is Cliff Ang. I am a Vice President at Compass Lexecon's Oakland, CA and Chicago, IL offices. Compass Lexecon is an economic consulting firm specializing in the application of economics to a variety of legal and regulatory issues. At Compass Lexecon, I specialize in the areas of valuation and securities. Over the last 10 years, I have worked on hundreds of engagements involving firms across a broad-spectrum of industries concerning issues such as appraisals, solvency, market efficiency, materiality, loss causation, and damages.
I am a CFA Charterholder and hold an MS in Finance from the University of the Philippines. I also hold a BSBA in finance and accounting from Washington University in St. Louis, where I subsequently completed doctoral coursework in finance, economics, and econometrics. I am an active volunteer with the CFA Institute in support of the CFA program. I also serve on the Olin Business School Alumni Board at Washington University in St. Louis. More information about me can be found in my CV or LinkedIn page.
My Models (models.cliffordang.com)I have extensive experience building sophisticated financial models in Excel/VBA and R. Aside from the models in my financial modeling book, I have developed a number of models for teaching purposes, which can be found at models.cliffordang.com. I also presented at the R in Finance Conference in 2012 a practical method of estimating the market value of illiquid debt. The presentation in that conference can be found here.
R and R for Finance LinksPublicly Available Finance Data Sources |
My Financial Modeling Textbook . . .
For those interested in learning financing modeling using R, please check out my book Analyzing Financial Data and Implementing Financial Models Using R. The models in this book are geared towards investments and asset pricing. It is published by Springer and available at, among other places, Amazon.com and Springer's website. You can also view the product flyer and find more information about the book on my publisher's website.
As a quick summary, the key features of the book are as follows:
I would like to thank those that have purchased my book. The options data used in the book can be found below: Call Options Data
Should you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please feel free to send me an e-mail. Why R?The following are just a few reasons why I like R: R is free to you and to your collaborators. No need to shell out a lot of money for excellent software. R has a wide community that helps contribute to the quality of R and the vast collection of packages available on R. The R community also has numerous R blogs and forums that help beginners and advanced users with programming issues aross a broad-range of topics.
Consequently, R has been increasing in popularity. For example, as the following Google Trends chart shows, since 2004, the interest in R has been increasing and the interest in other software such as SAS and MATLAB had been declining.
In addition, as reported in a Forbes magazine article on October 21, 2015, R is the top skill (aside from the generic term "data analysis") reported by data scientists on LinkedIn. The graph below produced by RJMetrics, which appears in the Forbes article, summarizes the top 20 skills for data scientists:
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My expertise is in asset pricing and corporate finance. I am the author of the financial modeling textbook Analyzing Financial Data and Implementing Financial Models Using R, which is described in more detail elsewhere on this page. My paper titled "