One of the main topics discussed at the 2006 conference was the explosion of the price of commodities, in particular oil which, back then, reached the price of 74 dollars. Analysts at that time were worried of the implications of this on the wider economy, in particular regarding the threat of inflation. Since then, two years later, the price of oil reached 110 dollars. This, in addition to the dramatic increase of the price of many other commodities, from metals to gold and lately, to wheat and other main agricultural products, has indeed now fed through to the wider economy in terms of inflation and the implications are starting to be felt by the consumers and, in turn, in terms of economic growth. Add in the recent ‘credit crunch’, and Central banks now face a big dilemma: on one hand they have rising commodities prices causing inflation and requiring higher interest rates, and on the other they have financial institutions which were unable to borrow money on the open market and are desperate for help to be able to continue working.

This book features papers presented at the third International Conference on Computational Finance and its Applications , and contains many high quality contributions reporting advances in the field and focussed on the following areas: Modern Financial Services Technologies; Derivatives Pricing; Forecasting, Advanced Computing and Simulation; Market Analysis, Dynamics and Simulation; Portfolio Management and Asset Allocation; Risk Management; Time Series Analysis and Forecasting; Intelligent Trading Agents; Advanced Computing and Simulation.