Quantitative finance: depending upon where you live, this may be an everyday requirement for you. Bigger cities and financial hubs, such as New York, Chicago, and London, will have this everywhere. But for those not familiar with the term, let's start with a brief description of what we are dealing with. Quantitative finance is a field of applied mathematics. It deals mostly with the modeling of financial markets. It overlaps heavily with computational finance and financial engineering, focusing on applications and modeling, as well as building tools for model implementation. The term most familiar with quantitative financing are the people that do it, more commonly referred to as quants. What does a quant do? Well, a financial economist will study structural relationships and the reasons why a corporation trades under a specific share price, while a quant will assume that the share price is a given and use mathematical techniques to elucidate the fair value of derivatives of the underlying stock.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• Creating a quantitative financial microservice
• Price bonds
• Price Credit Default Swap (CDS)

There is no doubt that in your particular situation you will need to hook up to a live information feed or other data source, and luckily you have the freedom to do just that. We will take the steps necessary to get you up and running using predefined values, and you can replace them with the pricing source of your choice. Let's start by creating our console application, as we did with our other microservices. We will call this microservice QuantMicroService for ease of use.