Extracting market expectations has always been an important issue when making national policies and investment decisions in financial markets. In option markets, the most popular way has been to extract implied volatilities to assess the future variability of the underlying with the use of the Black and Scholes formula. In this manuscript, we propose a novel way to extract the whole time varying distribution of the market implied asset price from option prices. We use a Bayesian nonparametric method that makes use of the Sethuraman representation for Dirichlet processes to take into account the evolution of distributions in time. As an illustration, we present the analysis of options on the SP500 index.
This work studies the valuation of currency options in markets suffering from a financial crisis. We consider a European option where the underlying asset is a foreign currency. We assume that the value of the underlying asset is a stochastic process that follows a modified Black-Scholes model with an augmented stochastic volatility. Under these settings, we provide a closed form solution for the option-pricing problem on foreign currency for the European call and put options. A mathematical proof is provided for the underlying solution. In addition, simulation results and an application are p…
We consider option pricing using replicating binomial trees, with a two fold purpose. The first is to introduce ESG valuation into option pricing. We explore this in a number of scenarios, including enhancement of yield due to trader information and the impact of the past history of a market driver. The second is to emphasize the use of discrete dynamic pricing, rather than continuum models, as the natural model that governs actual market practice. We further emphasize that discrete option pricing models must use discrete compounding (such as risk-free rate compounding of $1+r_f Δt$) rather th…
One of the shortcomings of the Black and Scholes model on option pricing is the assumption that trading of the underlying asset does not affect the price of that asset. This assumption can be fulfilled only in perfectly liquid markets. Since most markets are illquid, this assumption might be too restrictive. Thus, taking into account the price impact in option pricing is an important issue. This issue has been dealt with, to some extent, for illiquid markets by assuming a continuous process, mainly based on the Brownian motion. However, the recent financial crisis and its effects on the global…
We propose a general framework of European power option pricing under two different market assumptions about extended Vasicěk interest rate process and exponential Ornstein-Uhlenbeck asset process with continuous dividend as underlying, in which the Brownian motions involved in Vasicěk interest rate and exponential Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process are time-dependent correlated in equivalent martingale measure probability space or real-world probability space respectively. We first develop European power option pricing in two types of payoffs with martingale method under the market assumption that Va…
Assuming that price of the underlying stock is moving in range bound, the Black-Scholes formula for options pricing supports a separation of variables. The resulting time-independent equation is solved employing different behavior of the option price function and three significant results are deduced. The first is the probability of stock price penetration through support or resistance level, called transmission coefficient. The second is the distance that price will go through once stock price penetrates out of the range bound. The last one is a predicted short time dramatic fall in the stock…
We show that prices and shortfall risks of game (Israeli) barrier options in a sequence of binomial approximations of the Black--Scholes (BS) market converge to the corresponding quantities for similar game barrier options in the BS market with path dependent payoffs and the speed of convergence is estimated, as well. The results are new also for usual American style options and they are interesting from the computational point of view, as well, since in binomial markets these quantities can be obtained via dynamical programming algorithms. The paper continues the study of [11]and [7] but requ…
The problem of determining the European-style option price in the incomplete market has been examined within the framework of stochastic optimization. An analytic method based on the discrete dynamic programming equation (Bellman equation) has been developed that gives the general formalism for determining the option price and the optimal trading strategy (optimal control policy) that reduces total risk inherent in writing the option. The basic purpose of paper is to present an effective algorithm that can be used in practice. Keywords: option pricing, incomplete market, transaction costs, sto…
The pricing and hedging of a general class of options (including American, Bermudan and European options) on multiple assets are studied in the context of currency markets where trading is subject to proportional transaction costs, and where the existence of a risk-free numéraire is not assumed. Constructions leading to algorithms for computing the prices, optimal hedging strategies and stopping times are presented for both long and short option positions in this setting, together with probabilistic (martingale) representations for the option prices.
In this paper, we are presenting a method for estimation of market parameters modeled by jump diffusion process. The method proposed is based on Gibbs sampler, while the market parameters are the drift, the volatility, the jump intensity and its rate of occurrence. Demonstration on how to use these parameters to estimate the fair price of European call option and annuity will be shown, for the situation where the market is modeled by jump diffusion process with different intensity and occurrence. The results is compared to conventional options to observe the impact of jump effects.
We consider arbitrage free valuation of European options in Black-Scholes and Merton markets, where the general structure of the market is known, however the specific parameters are not known. In order to reflect this subjective uncertainty of a market participant, we follow a Bayesian approach to option pricing. Here we use historic discrete or continuous observations of the market to set up posterior distributions for the future market. Given a subjective physical measure for the market dynamics, we derive the existence of arbitrage free pricing rules by constructing subjective option pricin…
We study the upper and lower bounds for prices of European and American style options with the possibility of an external termination, meaning that the contract may be terminated at some random time. Under the assumption that the underlying market model is incomplete and frictionless, we obtain duality results linking the upper price of a vulnerable European option with the price of an American option whose exercise times are constrained to times at which the external termination can happen with a non-zero probability. Similarly, the upper and lower prices for an vulnerable American option are…
Consider the problem of pricing options on forwards in energy markets, when spot prices follow a geometric multi-factor model in which several rates of mean reversion appear. In this paper we investigate the role played by slow mean reversion when pricing and hedging options. In particular, we determine both upper and lower bounds for the error one makes neglecting low rates of mean reversion in the spot price dynamics.
After a market downturn, especially in an uncertain economic environment such as the current state, there can be a relatively long period with a sideways market, where indexes, stocks, etc., move in channels with support and resistance levels. We discuss option pricing in such scenarios, in both cases of unattainable as well as attainable boundaries, and obtain closed-form option pricing formulas. Our results also apply to FX rates in target zones without interest rate pegging (USD/HKD, digital currencies, etc.).
In this paper we provide evidence that financial option markets for equity indices give rise to non-trivial dependency structures between its constituents. Thus, if the individual constituent distributions of an equity index are inferred from the single-stock option markets and combined via a Gaussian copula, for example, one fails to explain the steepness of the observed volatility skew of the index. Intuitively, index option prices are encoding higher correlations in cases where the option is particularly sensitive to stress scenarios of the market. As a result, more complex dependency struc…
We study a class of nonlinear pricing models which involves the feedback effect from the dynamic hedging strategies on the price of asset introduced by Sircar and Papanicolaou. We are first to study the case of a nonlinear demand function involved in the model. Using a Lie group analysis we investigate the symmetry properties of these nonlinear diffusion equations. We provide the optimal systems of subalgebras and the complete set of non-equivalent reductions of studied PDEs to ODEs. In most cases we obtain families of exact solutions or derive particular solutions to the equations.
We propose a model to quantify the effect of parameter uncertainty on the option price in the Heston model. More precisely, we present a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman framework which allows us to evaluate best and worst case scenarios under an uncertain market price of volatility risk. For the numerical approximation the Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman equation is reformulated to enable the solution with a finite element method. A case study with butterfly options exhibits how the dependence of Delta on the magnitude of the uncertainty is nonlinear and highly varied across the parameter regime. Keywords: …
The cryptocurrency market is volatile, non-stationary and non-continuous. Together with liquid derivatives markets, this poses a unique opportunity to study risk management, especially the hedging of options, in a turbulent market. We study the hedge behaviour and effectiveness for the class of affine jump diffusion models and infinite activity Levy processes. First, market data is calibrated to stochastic volatility inspired (SVI)-implied volatility surfaces to price options. To cover a wide range of market dynamics, we generate Monte Carlo price paths using an SVCJ model (stochastic volatili…
In electricity markets, futures contracts typically function as a swap since they deliver the underlying over a period of time. In this paper, we introduce a market price for the delivery periods of electricity swaps, thereby opening an arbitrage-free pricing framework for derivatives based on these contracts. Furthermore, we use a weighted geometric averaging of an artificial geometric futures price over the corresponding delivery period. Without any need for approximations, this averaging results in geometric swap price dynamics. Our framework allows for including typical features as the Sam…
In this work, we aim to gain a better understanding of the volatility smile observed in options markets through microsimulation (MS). We adopt two types of active traders in our MS model: speculators and arbitrageurs, and call and put options on one underlying asset. Speculators make decisions based on their expectations of the asset price at the option expiration time. Arbitrageurs trade at different arbitrage opportunities such as violation of put-call parity. Difference in liquidity among options is also included. Notwithstanding its simplicity, our model can generate implied volatility (IV…
We study valuation of swing options on commodity markets when the commodity prices are driven by multiple factors. The factors are modeled as diffusion processes driven by a multidimensional Lévy process. We set up a valuation model in terms of a dynamic programming problem where the option can be exercised continuously in time. Here, the number of swing rights is given by a total volume constraint. We analyze some general properties of the model and study the solution by analyzing the associated HJB-equation. Furthermore, we discuss the issues caused by the multi-dimensionality of the commodi…
Proof that under simple assumptions, such as constraints of Put-Call Parity, the probability measure for the valuation of a European option has the mean derived from the forward price which can, but does not have to be the risk-neutral one, under any general probability distribution, bypassing the Black-Scholes-Merton dynamic hedging argument, and without the requirement of complete markets and other strong assumptions. We confirm that the heuristics used by traders for centuries are both more robust, more consistent, and more rigorous than held in the economics literature. We also show that o…
An option market maker incurs funding costs when carrying and hedging inventory. To hedge a net long delta inventory, for example, she pays a fee to borrow stock from the securities lending market. Because of haircuts, she posts additional cash margin to the lender which needs to be financed at her unsecured debt rate. This paper incorporates funding asymmetry (borrowed cash and invested cash earning different interest rates) and realistic stock financing cost into the classic option pricing theory. It is shown that an option position can be dynamically replicated and self financed in the pres…
We consider option pricing in a regime-switching diffusion market. As the market is incomplete, there is no unique price for a derivative. We apply the good-deal pricing bounds idea to obtain ranges for the price of a derivative. As an illustration, we calculate the good-deal pricing bounds for a European call option and we also examine the stability of these bounds when we change the generator of the Markov chain which drives the regime-switching. We find that the pricing bounds depend strongly on the choice of the generator.
Mathematical models for financial asset prices which include, for example, stochastic volatility or jumps are incomplete in that derivative securities are generally not replicable by trading in the underlying. In earlier work (2004) the first author provided a geometric condition under which trading in the underlying and a finite number of vanilla options completes the market. We complement this result in several ways. First, we show that the geometric condition is not necessary and a weaker, necessary and sufficient, condition is presented. While this condition is generally not directly verif…
Is an option to early terminate a swap at its market value worth zero? At first sight it is, but in presence of counterparty risk it depends on the criteria used to determine such market value. In case of a single uncollateralised swap transaction under ISDA between two defaultable counterparties, the additional unilateral option to early terminate the swap at predefined dates requires a Bermudan credit valuation adjustment. We give a general pricing formula assuming a default-free close-out amount, and apply it in a simplified setting with deterministic intensity and one single date of option…
We study the optimal timing of derivative purchases in incomplete markets. In our model, an investor attempts to maximize the spread between her model price and the offered market price through optimally timing her purchase. Both the investor and the market value the options by risk-neutral expectations but under different equivalent martingale measures representing different market views. The structure of the resulting optimal stopping problem depends on the interaction between the respective market price of risk and the option payoff. In particular, a crucial role is played by the delayed pu…
We develop an arbitrage-free random field LIBOR market model to price cross-currency derivatives. The uncertainty of the forward LIBOR rates of our cross-currency model is driven by a two time parameter random field instead of a finite dimensional Brownian motion. To demonstrate the applications of this model, we develop an approximate closed-form pricing formula for Quanto caps and cross-currency swaps. Further, we derive an exact pricing formula for an exchange rate option in the random field setting.
The expOU stochastic volatility model is capable of reproducing fairly well most important statistical properties of financial markets daily data. Among them, the presence of multiple time scales in the volatility autocorrelation is perhaps the most relevant which makes appear fat tails in the return distributions. This paper wants to go further on with the expOU model we have studied in Ref. 1 by exploring an aspect of practical interest. Having as a benchmark the parameters estimated from the Dow Jones daily data, we want to compute the price for the European option. This is actually done by…
In this work we consider three problems of the standard market approach to pricing of credit index options: the definition of the index spread is not valid in general, the usually considered payoff leads to a pricing which is not always defined, and the candidate numeraire one would use to define a pricing measure is not strictly positive, which would lead to a non-equivalent pricing measure. We give a general mathematical solution to the three problems, based on a novel way of modeling the flow of information through the definition of a new subfiltration. Using this subfiltration, we take int…
In the paper we develop mathematical tools of quantile hedging in incomplete market. Those could be used for two significant applications: o calculating the \textbf{optimal capital requirement imposed by Solvency II} (Directive 2009/138/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council) when the market and non-market risk is present in insurance company. We show hot to find the minimal capital $V_0$ to provide with the one-year hedging strategy for insurance company satisfying $E\left[{\mathbf 1}_{\{V_1 \geq D\}}\right]=0.995$, where $V_1$ denotes the value of insurance company in one year time…
In this note, we consider a general discrete time financial market with proportional transaction costs as in Kabanov and Stricker (2001), Kabanov et al. (2002), Kabanov et al. (2003) and Schachermayer (2004). We provide a dual formulation for the set of initial endowments which allow to super-hedge some American claim. We show that this extends the result of Chalasani and Jha (2001) which was obtained in a model with constant transaction costs and risky assets which evolve on a finite dimensional tree. We also provide fairly general conditions under which the expected formulation in terms of s…
Several models for the pricing of derivative securities in illiquid markets are discussed. A typical type of nonlinear partial differential equations arising from these investigation is studied. The scaling properties of these equations are discussed. Explicit solutions for one of the models are obtained and studied.
Continuous-time random walks are a well suited tool for the description of market behaviour at the smallest scale: the tick-to-tick evolution. We will apply this kind of market model to the valuation of perpetual American options: derivatives with no maturity that can be exercised at any time. Our approach leads to option prices that fulfil financial formulas when canonical assumptions on the dynamics governing the process are made, but it is still suitable for more exotic market conditions.
Pricing options on illiquid assets using liquid market benchmarks: an application to energy markets
Enel Global Energy and Commodity Management（Enel全球能源与商品管理部）；Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Roma Tor Vergata（罗马托尔维加塔大学数学系）；INdAM-GNAMPA, Research Unit at Tor Vergata（Tor Vergata INdAM-GNAMPA研究组）；Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università di Roma Tor Vergata（罗马托尔维加塔大学经济与金融系）
We develop an option pricing model based on a tug-of-war game. This two-player zero-sum stochastic differential game is formulated in the context of a multi-dimensional financial market. The issuer and the holder try to manipulate asset price processes in order to minimize and maximize the expected discounted reward. We prove that the game has a value and that the value function is the unique viscosity solution to a terminal value problem for a parabolic partial differential equation involving the non-linear and completely degenerate infinity Laplace operator.
We use a continuous version of the standard deviation premium principle for pricing in incomplete equity markets by assuming that the investor issuing an unhedgeable derivative security requires compensation for this risk in the form of a pre-specified instantaneous Sharpe ratio. First, we apply our method to price options on non-traded assets for which there is a traded asset that is correlated to the non-traded asset. Our main contribution to this particular problem is to show that our seller/buyer prices are the upper/lower good deal bounds of Cochrane and Saá-Requejo (2000) and of Björk an…
In commodity and energy markets swing options allow the buyer to hedge against futures price fluctuations and to select its preferred delivery strategy within daily or periodic constraints, possibly fixed by observing quoted futures contracts. In this paper we focus on the natural gas market and we present a dynamical model for commodity futures prices able to calibrate liquid market quotes and to imply the volatility smile for futures contracts with different delivery periods. We implement the numerical problem by means of a least-square Monte Carlo simulation and we investigate alternative a…
We present a stochastic-local volatility model for derivative contracts on commodity futures able to describe forward-curve and smile dynamics with a fast calibration to liquid market quotes. A parsimonious parametrization is introduced to deal with the limited number of options quoted in the market. Cleared commodity markets for futures and options are analyzed to include in the pricing framework specific trading clauses and margining procedures. Numerical examples for calibration and pricing are provided for different commodity products.
We consider a model of linear market impact, and address the problem of replicating a contingent claim in this framework. We derive a non-linear Black-Scholes Equation that provides an exact replication strategy. This equation is fully non-linear and singular, but we show that it is well posed, and we prove existence of smooth solutions for a large class of final payoffs, both for constant and local volatility. To obtain regularity of the solutions, we develop an original method based on Legendre transforms. The close connections with the problem of hedging with it gamma constraints studied by…
We suggest an intermediate currency approach that allows us to price options on all FX markets simultaneously under the same risk-neutral measure which ensures consistency of FX option prices across all markets. In particular, it is sufficient to calibrate a model to the volatility smile on the domestic market as, due to the consistency of pricing formulas, the model automatically reproduces the correct smile for the inverse pair (the foreign market). We first consider the case of two currencies and then the multi-currency setting. We illustrate the intermediate currency approach by applying i…
We show that shortfall risks of American options in a sequence of multinomial approximations of the multidimensional Black--Scholes (BS) market converge to the corresponding quantities for similar American options in the multidimensional BS market with path dependent payoffs. In comparison to previous papers we consider the multi assets case for which we use the weak convergence approach.
We study Vanna-Volga methods which are used to price first generation exotic options in the Foreign Exchange market. They are based on a rescaling of the correction to the Black-Scholes price through the so-called `probability of survival' and the `expected first exit time'. Since the methods rely heavily on the appropriate treatment of market data we also provide a summary of the relevant conventions. We offer a justification of the core technique for the case of vanilla options and show how to adapt it to the pricing of exotic options. Our results are compared to a large collection of indica…
We investigate the relation between the fair price for European-style vanilla options and the distribution of short-term returns on the underlying asset ignoring transaction and other costs. We compute the risk-neutral probability density conditional on the total variance of the asset's returns when the option expires. If the asset's future price has finite expectation, the option's fair value satisfies a parabolic partial differential equation of the Black-Scholes type in which the variance of the asset's returns rather than a trading time is the evolution parameter. By immunizing the portfol…
In an observed generalized semi-Markov regime, estimation of transition rate of regime switching leads towards calculation of locally risk minimizing option price. Despite the uniform convergence of estimated step function of transition rate, to meet the existence of classical solution of the modified price equation, the estimator is approximated in the class of smooth functions and furthermore, the convergence is established. Later, the existence of the solution of the modified price equation is verified and the point-wise convergence of such approximation of option price is proved to answer …
We study pricing and (super)hedging for American options in an imperfect market model with default, where the imperfections are taken into account via the nonlinearity of the wealth dynamics. The payoff is given by an RCLL adapted process $(ξ_t)$. We define the {\em seller's superhedging price} of the American option as the minimum of the initial capitals which allow the seller to build up a superhedging portfolio. We prove that this price coincides with the value function of an optimal stopping problem with nonlinear expectations induced by BSDEs with default jump, which corresponds to the so…
Based on forward curves modelled as Hilbert-space valued processes, we analyse the pricing of various options relevant in energy markets. In particular, we connect empirical evidence about energy forward prices known from the literature to propose stochastic models. Forward prices can be represented as linear functions on a Hilbert space, and options can thus be viewed as derivatives on the whole curve. The value of these options are computed under various specifications, in addition to their deltas. In a second part, cross-commodity models are investigated, leading to a study of square integr…
