This volume presents a collection of contributions dedicated to applied problems in the financial and energy sectors that have been formulated and solved in a stochastic optimization framework. The invited authors represent a group of scientists and practitioners, who cooperated in recent years to facilitate the growing penetration of stochastic programming techniques in real-world applications, inducing a significant advance over a large spectrum of complex decision problems.

After the recent widespread liberalization of the energy sector in Europe and the unprecedented growth of energy prices in international commodity markets, we have witnessed a significant convergence of strategic decision problems in the energy and financial sectors. This has often resulted in common open issues and has induced a remarkable effort by the industrial and scientific communities to facilitate the adoption of advanced analytical and decision tools. The main concerns of the financial community over the last decade have suddenly penetrated the energy sector inducing a remarkable scientific and practical effort to address previously unforeseeable management problems. This proposal aims to include in a unified framework for the first time an extensive set of contributions related to real-world applied problems in finance and energy, leading to a common methodological approach and in many cases having similar underlying economic and financial implications.

During the spring and the summer of 2007 the School of Stochastic Programming held in Bergamo (www.unibg.it/sps2007), and the eleventh symposium on Stochastic Programming in Vienna (http: //www.univie.ac.at/spxi), offered two venues for the presentation of the chapters included in the volume. After the two events, during the fall of 2007, all the invited contributors enthusiastically accepted the invitation to present their original work in the projected volume, from which this proposal was developed.

The volume is structured in three parts, devoted to contributions related to financial applications - Part I, with 7 chapters; energy applications - Part II, with 8 chapters; and to specific theoretical and computational issues - Part III, with 6 chapters -- recently developed in the scientific community and explicitly related to the applied problems presented.

This volume presents a collection of contributions dedicated to applied problems in the financial and energy sectors that have been formulated and solved in a stochastic optimization framework. The invited authors represent a group of scientists and practitioners, who cooperated in recent years to facilitate the growing penetration of stochastic programming techniques in real-world applications, inducing a significant advance over a large spectrum of complex decision problems. After the recent widespread liberalization of the energy sector in Europe and the unprecedented growth of energy prices in international commodity markets, we have witnessed a significant convergence of strategic decision problems in the energy and financial sectors. This has often resulted in common open issues and has induced a remarkable effort by the industrial and scientific communities to facilitate the adoption of advanced analytical and decision tools. The main concerns of the financial community over the last decade have suddenly penetrated the energy sector inducing a remarkable scientific and practical effort to address previously unforeseeable management problems. Stochastic Optimization Methods in Finance and Energy: New Financial Products and Energy Markets Strategies aims to include in a unified framework for the first time an extensive set of contributions related to real-world applied problems in finance and energy, leading to a common methodological approach and in many cases having similar underlying economic and financial implications. Part 1 of the book presents 6 chapters related to financial applications; Part 2 presents 7 chapters on energy applications; and Part 3 presents 5 chapters devoted to specific theoretical and computational issues.

The papers in this volume address various aspects of financial derivatives that range from abstract financial theory to practical issues pertaining to the pricing and hedging of interest rate derivatives and exotic options in the market place. This broad and important collection will interest both academic scholars and financial engineers.

We wrote this book as the result of a number of passionate, and it must be admitted heated, conversations on the EMU question before Christmas 2011, around the time of the Fiscal Compact, which led to a first draft in January this year. We are putting the finishing touches to the work on the twentieth anniversary of the UK's exit from ERM, which occurred on 16th September 1992. European events continue to dominate the UK agenda, but now also the sentiment in global financial markets. We each have grown up with the spectre of the European question: How far should the UK integrate into the European project? The answer to that question has continually provided the context for so much of the UK policy agenda that it has sometimes proved hard to think more profoundly about the question in the Kennedy-sense of not what the Euro can do for us but what we can do for the Euro. Undoubtedly the missing ingredient in the Euro debate is what we might call good old-fashioned market liberalism. That would probably have been the main contribution that UK entry to EMU could have provided to Euro policymaking elite. We maintain in what follows that financial markets are not to be feared but, as they are enormously powerful machines for processing information, to be learnt from. However, they must also be intelligently managed, as they are prone to fads and fashions. We have tried here to collect up a number of such observations and comments into an agenda for reform in terms of necessary steps towards a functional Eurozone. This is not because we think that common currency ought to fail, but because we think that the current situation can and should be rescued. However time though is short. Already the sinews of the policymakers have been stretched to breaking point, and sadly, economic and monetary policy is not far behind.'