Collateralization with daily margining has become a new standard in the post-crisis market. Although there appeared vast literature on a so-called multi-curve framework, a complete picture of a multi-currency setup with cross-currency basis can be rarely found since our initial attempts. This work gives its extension regarding a general framework of interest rates in a fully collateralized market. It gives a new formulation of the currency funding spread which is better suited for the general dependence. In the last half, it develops a discretization of the HJM framework with a fixed tenor structure, which makes it implementable as a traditional Market Model.
This paper presents a new model for pricing financial derivatives subject to collateralization. It allows for collateral arrangements adhering to bankruptcy laws. As such, the model can back out the market price of a collateralized contract. This framework is very useful for valuing outstanding derivatives. Using a unique dataset, we find empirical evidence that credit risk alone is not overly important in determining credit-related spreads. Only accounting for both collateral posting and credit risk can sufficiently explain unsecured credit costs. This finding suggests that failure to properl…
We present a general derivation of the arbitrage-free pricing framework for multiple-currency collateralized products. We include the impact on option pricing of the policy adopted to fund in foreign currency, so that we are able to price contracts with cash flows and/or collateral accounts expressed in foreign currencies inclusive of funding costs originating from dislocations in the FX market. Then, we apply these results to price cross-currency swaps under different market situations, to understand how to implement a feasible curve bootstrap procedure. We present the main practical problems…
This study deals with the pricing and hedging of single-tranche collateralized debt obligations (STCDOs). We specify an affine two-factor model in which a catastrophic risk component is incorporated. Apart from being analytically tractable, this model has the feature that it captures the dynamics of super-senior tranches, thanks to the catastrophic component. We estimate the factor model based on the iTraxx Europe data with six tranches and four different maturities, using a quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) approach in conjunction with the Kalman filter. We derive the model-based variance-minimi…
In this paper, we have studied the pricing of a continuously collateralized CDS. We have made use of the "survival measure" to derive the pricing formula in a straightforward way. As a result, we have found that there exists irremovable trace of the counter party as well as the investor in the price of CDS through their default dependence even under the perfect collateralization, although the hazard rates of the two parties are totally absent from the pricing formula. As an important implication, we have also studied the situation where the investor enters an offsetting back-to-back trade with…
In this article, we combine replication pricing with expectation pricing for derivative trades that are partially collateralized by cash. The derivatives are replicated by underlying assets and cash, using repurchasing agreement (repo) and margining, which incur funding costs. We derive a partial differential equation (PDE) for the derivatives price, obtain and decompose its solution into the risk-free value of the derivative plus credit valuation adjustment (CVA) and funding valuation adjustment (FVA). For most derivatives, as we shall show, CVAs can be evaluated analytically or semi-analytic…
The market practice of extrapolating different term structures from different instruments lacks a rigorous justification in terms of cash flows structure and market observables. In this paper, we integrate our previous consistent theory for pricing under credit, collateral and funding risks into term structure modelling, integrating the origination of different term structures with such effects. Under a number of assumptions on collateralization, wrong-way risk, gap risk, credit valuation adjustments and funding effects, including the treasury operational model, and via an immersion hypothesis…
This article presents a new model for valuing a credit default swap (CDS) contract that is affected by multiple credit risks of the buyer, seller and reference entity. We show that default dependency has a significant impact on asset pricing. In fact, correlated default risk is one of the most pervasive threats in financial markets. We also show that a fully collateralized CDS is not equivalent to a risk-free one. In other words, full collateralization cannot eliminate counterparty risk completely in the CDS market.
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…
The importance of collateralization through the change of funding cost is now well recognized among practitioners. In this article, we have extended the previous studies of collateralized derivative pricing to more generic situation, that is asymmetric and imperfect collateralization with the associated counter party credit risk. By introducing the collateral coverage ratio, our framework can handle these issues in an unified manner. Although the resultant pricing formula becomes non-linear FBSDE and cannot be solve exactly, the fist order approximation is provided using Gateaux derivative. We…
In this paper, we model financial markets with semi-Markov volatilities and price covarinace and correlation swaps for this markets. Numerical evaluations of vari- nace, volatility, covarinace and correlations swaps with semi-Markov volatility are presented as well. The novelty of the paper lies in pricing of volatility swaps in closed form, and pricing of covariance and correlation swaps in a market with two risky assets.
This papers addresses the stock option pricing problem in a continuous time market model where there are two stochastic tradable assets, and one of them is selected as a numéraire. It is shown that the presence of arbitrarily small stochastic deviations in the evolution of the numéraire process causes significant changes in the market properties. In particular, an equivalent martingale measure is not unique for this market, and there are non-replicable claims. The martingale prices and the hedging error can vary significantly and take extreme values, for some extreme choices of the equivalent …
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…
This paper considers the modelling of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). We propose a top-down model via forward rates generalizing Filipović, Overbeck and Schmidt (2009) to the case where the forward rates are driven by a finite dimensional Lévy process. The contribution of this work is twofold: we provide conditions for absence of arbitrage in this generalized framework. Furthermore, we study the relation to market models by embedding them in the forward rate framework in spirit of Brace, Gatarek and Musiela (1997).
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…
In this work we derive an approximated no-arbitrage market valuation formula for Constant Maturity Credit Default Swaps (CMCDS). We move from the CDS options market model in Brigo (2004), and derive a formula for CMCDS that is the analogous of the formula for constant maturity swaps in the default free swap market under the LIBOR market model. A "convexity adjustment"-like correction is present in the related formula. Without such correction, or with zero correlations, the formula returns an obvious deterministic-credit-spread expression for the CMCDS price. To obtain the result we derive a jo…
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.).
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.
In this paper we study dynamic pricing mechanisms of financial derivatives. A typical model of such pricing mechanism is the so-called g--expectation defined by solutions of a backward stochastic differential equation with g as its generating function. Black-Scholes pricing model is a special linear case of this pricing mechanism. We are mainly concerned with two types of pricing mechanisms in an option market: the market pricing mechanism through which the market prices of options are produced, and the ask-bid pricing mechanism operated through the system of market makers. The later one is a …
The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive study no-arbitrage pricing of financial derivatives in the presence of funding costs, the counterparty credit risk and market frictions affecting the trading mechanism, such as collateralization and capital requirements. To achieve our goals, we extend in several respects the nonlinear pricing approach developed in El Karoui and Quenez (1997) and El Karoui et al. (1997), which was subsequently continued in Bielecki and Rutkowski (2015).
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…
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…
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 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 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.
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 study the range of prices at which a rational agent should contemplate transacting a financial contract outside a given securities market. Trading is subject to nonproportional transaction costs and portfolio constraints and full replication by way of market instruments is not always possible. Rationality is defined in terms of consistency with market prices and acceptable risk thresholds. We obtain a direct and a dual description of market-consistent prices with acceptable risk. The dual characterization requires an appropriate extension of the classical Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricin…
The paper develops general, discrete, non-probabilistic market models and minmax price bounds leading to price intervals for European options. The approach provides the trajectory based analogue of martingale-like properties as well as a generalization that allows a limited notion of arbitrage in the market while still providing coherent option prices. Several properties of the price bounds are obtained, in particular a connection with risk neutral pricing is established for trajectory markets associated to a continuous-time martingale model.
We present a novel approach to the pricing of financial instruments in emission markets, for example, the EU ETS. The proposed structural model is positioned between existing complex full equilibrium models and pure reduced form models. Using an exogenously specified demand for a polluting good it gives a causal explanation for the accumulation of CO2 emissions and takes into account the feedback effect from the cost of carbon to the rate at which the market emits CO2. We derive a forward-backward stochastic differential equation for the price process of the allowance certificate and solve the…
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.
The LIBOR Market Model (LMM) is a widely used model for pricing interest rate derivatives. While the Black-Scholes model is well-known for pricing stock derivatives such as stock options, a larger portion of derivatives are based on interest rates instead of stocks. Pricing interest rate derivatives used to be challenging, as their previous models employed either the instantaneous interest or forward rate that could not be directly observed in the market. This has been much improved since LMM was raised, as it uses directly observable interbank offered rates and is expected to be more precise.…
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.
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…
In electricity markets, it is sensible to use a two-factor model with mean reversion for spot prices. One of the factors is an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process driven by a Brownian motion and accounts for the small variations. The other factor is an OU process driven by a pure jump Lévy process and models the characteristic spikes observed in such markets. When it comes to pricing, a popular choice of pricing measure is given by the Esscher transform that preserves the probabilistic structure of the driving Lévy processes, while changing the levels of mean reversion. Using this choice one can g…
In this paper we describe how to include funding and margining costs into a risk-neutral pricing framework for counterparty credit risk. We consider realistic settings and we include in our models the common market practices suggested by the ISDA documentation without assuming restrictive constraints on margining procedures and close-out netting rules. In particular, we allow for asymmetric collateral and funding rates, and exogenous liquidity policies and hedging strategies. Re-hypothecation liquidity risk and close-out amount evaluation issues are also covered. We define a comprehensive pric…
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…
Catastrophe risk is a major threat faced by individuals, companies, and entire economies. Catastrophe (CAT) bonds have emerged as a method to offset this risk and a corresponding literature has developed that attempts to provide a market-consistent pricing methodology for these and other long-dated, insurance-type contracts. This paper aims to unify and generalize several of the widely-used pricing approaches for long-dated contracts with a focus on stylized CAT bonds and market-consistent valuation. It proposes a loading pricing concept that combines the theoretically possible minimal price o…
This paper studies pricing derivatives in an age-dependent semi-Markov modulated market. We consider a financial market where the asset price dynamics follow a regime switching geometric Brownian motion model in which the coefficients depend on finitely many age-dependent semi-Markov processes. We further allow the volatility coefficient to depend on time explicitly. Under these market assumptions, we study locally risk minimizing pricing of a class of European options. It is shown that the price function can be obtained by solving a non-local B-S-M type PDE. We establish existence and uniquen…
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…
Biondi et al. (2012) develop an analytical model to examine the emergent dynamic properties of share market price formation over time, capable to capture important stylized facts. These latter properties prove to be sensitive to regulatory regimes for fundamental information provision, as well as to market confidence conditions among actual and potential investors. Regimes based upon mark-to-market (fair value) measurement of traded security, while generating higher linear correlation between market prices and fundamental signals, also involve higher market instability and volatility. These re…
We consider an incomplete multi-asset binomial market model. We prove that for a wide class of contingent claims the extremal multi-step martingale measure is a power of the corresponding single-step extremal martingale measure. This allows for closed form formulas for the bounds of a no-arbitrage contingent claim price interval. We construct a feasible algorithm for computing those boundaries as well as for the corresponding hedging strategies. Our results apply, for example, to European basket call and put options and Asian arithmetic average options.
We consider two risk-averse financial agents who negotiate the price of an illiquid indivisible contingent claim in an incomplete semimartingale market environment. Under the assumption that the agents are exponential utility maximizers with non-traded random endowments, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for negotiation to be successful, i.e., for the trade to occur. We also study the asymptotic case where the size of the claim is small compared to the random endowments and we give a full characterization in this case. Finally, we study a partial-equilibrium problem for a bundle o…
