th This book is devoted to the 19 Meeting of the EURO Working Group on Financial Modelling, held in Chania, Crete, Greece,November28-30, 1996. The EURO Working Group on Financial Modelling was founded in September 1986 in Lisbon. The primary field of interest for the Working Group can be described as "the development of financial models that help to solve problems facedby financial managers in the firm". From this point of view, the following objectivesof the Working Group are distinguished: • providing an international forum for exchange of information and experience on financial modelling; • encouraging research in financial modelling (i. e. new techniques, methodologies, software,empirical studies,etc. ); • stimulating and strengthening the interaction between financial economic theory and the practice of financial decision making; • cooperating and exchanging information with universities and financial institutions throughout Europe. According to the aboveobjectives,the basic aim of this book is to present some new operational approaches (i. e. neural nets, multicriteria analysis, new optimization algorithms, decision software, etc. ) for financial modelling, both in a theoretical and practical levels. Thus, the present volume is divided in nine chapters. The first chapter refers to the new trends in financial modelling and includes two invited papers by Gil-Aluja and Pardalos. The second chapter involves papers on the topic of high performance computing and finance which is a European union project in which participate some members of the EURO Working Group on Financial Modelling (Spronk, Zenios, Dempster, etc. ).