This paper does not suppose a priori that the evolution of the price of a financial asset is a semimartingale. Since possible strategies of investors are self-financing, previous prices are forced to be finite quadratic variation processes. The non-arbitrage property is not excluded if the class ${\cal A}$ of admissible strategies is restricted. The classical notion of martingale is replaced with the notion of ${\cal A}$-martingale. A calculus related to ${\cal A}$-martingales with some examples is developed. Some applications to the maximization of the utility of an insider are expanded.
A financial market model where agents trade using realistic combinations of buy-and-hold strategies is considered. Minimal assumptions are made on the discounted asset-price process - in particular, the semimartingale property is not assumed. Via a natural market viability assumption, namely, absence of arbitrages of the first kind, we establish that discounted asset-prices have to be semimartingales. In a slightly more specialized case, we extend the previous result in a weakened version of the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing that involves strictly positive supermartingale deflators rath…
In a general semimartingale financial model, we study the stability of the No Arbitrage of the First Kind (NA1) (or, equivalently, No Unbounded Profit with Bounded Risk) condition under initial and under progressive filtration enlargements. In both cases, we provide a simple and general condition which is sufficient to ensure this stability for any fixed semimartingale model. Furthermore, we give a characterisation of the NA1 stability for all semimartingale models.
We give a collection of explicit sufficient conditions for the true martingale property of a wide class of exponentials of semimartingales. We express the conditions in terms of semimartingale characteristics. This turns out to be very convenient in financial modeling in general. Especially it allows us to carefully discuss the question of well-definedness of semimartingale Libor models, whose construction crucially relies on a sequence of measure changes.
This paper does not suppose a priori that the evolution of the price of a financial asset is a semimartingale. Since possible strategies of investors are self-financing, previous prices are forced to be finite quadratic variation processes. The non-arbitrage property is not excluded if the class $\mathcal{A}$ of admissible strategies is restricted. The classical notion of martingale is replaced with the notion of $\mathcal{A}$-martingale. A calculus related to $\mathcal{A}$-martingales with some examples is developed. Some applications to no-arbitrage, viability, hedging and the maximization o…
Existence of stochastic financial equilibria giving rise to semimartingale asset prices is established under a general class of assumptions. These equilibria are expressed in real terms and span complete markets or markets with withdrawal constraints.We deal with random endowment density streams which admit jumps and general time-dependent utility functions on which only regularity conditions are imposed. As an integral part of the proof of the main result, we establish a novel characterization of semimartingale functions.
In this paper, we study the ruin problem with investment in a general framework where the business part X is a L{é}vy process and the return on investment R is a semimartingale. We obtain upper bounds on the finite and infinite time ruin probabilities that decrease as a power function when the initial capital increases. When R is a L{é}vy process, we retrieve the well-known results. Then, we show that these bounds are asymptotically optimal in the finite time case, under some simple conditions on the characteristics of X. Finally, we obtain a condition for ruin with probability one when X is a…
In this paper, we study the stability and convergence of some general quadratic semimartingales. Motivated by financial applications, we study simultaneously the semimartingale and its opposite. Their characterization and integrability properties are obtained through some useful exponential submartingale inequalities. Then, a general stability result, including the strong convergence of the martingale parts in various spaces ranging from $\mathbb{H}^1$ to BMO, is derived under some mild integrability condition on the exponential of the terminal value of the semimartingale. This can be applied …
We study the existence of the numeraire portfolio under predictable convex constraints in a general semimartingale model of a financial market. The numeraire portfolio generates a wealth process, with respect to which the relative wealth processes of all other portfolios are supermartingales. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the numeraire portfolio are obtained in terms of the triplet of predictable characteristics of the asset price process. This characterization is then used to obtain further necessary and sufficient conditions, in terms of a no-free-lunch-type notion…
This paper offers a systematic investigation on the existence of equivalent local martingale deflators, which are multiplicative special semimartingales, in financial markets given by positive semimartingales. In particular, it shows that the existence of such deflators can be characterized by means of the modified semimartingale characteristics. Several examples illustrate our results. Furthermore, we provide interpretations of the deflators from an economic point of view.
Let X and Y be an m-dimensional F-semimartingale and an n-dimensional H-semimartingale respectively on the same probability space, both enjoying the strong predictable representation property. We propose a martingale representation result under the probability measure P for the square integrable G-martingales, where G is the union of F and H. As a first application we identify the biggest possible value of the multiplicity in the sense of Davis and Varaiya of the union of F1,..., Fd, where, fixed i in (1,...,d), Fi is the reference filtration of a real martingale Mi, which enjoys the Fi-predic…
We derive a forward partial integro-differential equation for prices of call options in a model where the dynamics of the underlying asset under the pricing measure is described by a -possibly discontinuous- semimartingale. A uniqueness theorem is given for the solutions of this equation. This result generalizes Dupire's forward equation to a large class of non-Markovian models with jumps.
We deal with various alternative decompositions of F-martingales with respect to the filtration G which represents the enlargement of a filtration F by a progressive flow of observations of a random time that either belongs to the class of pseudo-honest times or satisfies the extended density hypothesis. Several related results from the existing literature are essentially extended. Results on G-semimartingale decompositions of F-local martingales are crucial for applications in financial mathematics, most notably in the context of modeling credit risk and the study of insider trading where the…
In this article we relate the set of structure preserving equivalent martingale measures $(\mathcal{M})$ for financial models driven by semimartingales with conditionally independent increments to a set of measurable and integrable functions $(\mathscr{Y})$. More precisely, we prove that $(\mathcal{M}\not = \emptyset)$ if, and only if, $(\mathscr{Y}\not = \emptyset)$, and connect the sets $(\mathcal{M})$ and $(\mathscr{Y})$ to the semimartingale characteristics of the driving process. As examples we consider integrated Lévy models with independent stochastic factors and time-changed Lévy model…
In this work, we consider the outer Stefan problem for the short-time prediction of the spread of a volatile asset traded in a financial market. The stochastic equation for the evolution of the density of sell and buy orders is the Heat Equation with a non-smooth noise in the sense of Walsh, posed in a moving boundary domain with velocity given by the Stefan condition. This condition determines the dynamics of the spread, and the solid phase $[s^-(t),s^+(t)]$ defines the bid-ask spread area wherein the transactions vanish. We introduce a reflection measure and prove existence and uniqueness of…
In this paper we investigate the local risk-minimization approach for a semimartingale financial market where there are restrictions on the available information to agents who can observe at least the asset prices. We characterize the optimal strategy in terms of suitable decompositions of a given contingent claim, with respect to a filtration representing the information level, even in presence of jumps. Finally, we discuss some practical examples in a Markovian framework and show that the computation of the optimal strategy leads to filtering problems under the real-world probability measure…
We consider a multivariate financial market with transaction costs and study the problem of finding the minimal initial capital needed to hedge, without risk, European-type contingent claims. The model is similar to the one considered in Bouchard and Touzi (2000), except that some of the assets can be exchanged freely, i.e. without paying transaction costs. In this context, we generalize the result of the above paper and prove that the value of this stochastic control problem is given by the cost of the cheapest hedging strategy in which the number of non-freely exchangeable assets is kept con…
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part we prove the fundamental theorem of asset pricing under short sales prohibitions in continuous-time financial models where asset prices are driven by nonnegative, locally bounded semimartingales. A key step in this proof is an extension of a well-known result of Ansel and Stricker. In the second part we study the hedging problem in these models and connect it to a properly defined property of "maximality" of contingent claims.
We analyze an optimal trade execution problem in a financial market with stochastic liquidity. To this end we set up a limit order book model in continuous time. Both order book depth and resilience are allowed to evolve randomly in time. We allow for trading in both directions and for càdlàg semimartingales as execution strategies. We derive a quadratic BSDE that under appropriate assumptions characterizes minimal execution costs and identify conditions under which an optimal execution strategy exists. We also investigate qualitative aspects of optimal strategies such as, e.g., appearance of …
Financial models are studied where each asset may potentially lose value relative to any other. Conditioning on non-devaluation, each asset can serve as proper numéraire and classical valuation rules can be formulated. It is shown when and how these local valuation rules can be aggregated to obtain global arbitrage-free valuation formulas.
We present a version of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing (FTAP) for continuous time large financial markets with two filtrations in an $L^p$-setting for $ 1 \leq p < \infty$. This extends the results of Yuri Kabanov and Christophe Stricker \cite{KS:06} to continuous time and to a large financial market setting, however, still preserving the simplicity of the discrete time setting. On the other hand it generalizes Stricker's $L^p$-version of FTAP \cite{S:90} towards a setting with two filtrations. We do neither assume that price processes are semi-martigales, (and it does not follow due…
This paper deals with the notion of a large financial market and the concepts of asymptotic arbitrage and strong asymptotic arbitrage (both of the first kind), introduced by Yu.M. Kabanov and D.O. Kramkov. We show that the arbitrage properties of a large market are completely determined by the asymptotic behavior of the sequence of the numéraire portfolios, related to the small markets. The obtained criteria can be expressed in terms of contiguity, entire separation and Hellinger integrals, provided these notions are extended to sub-probability measures. As examples we consider market models o…
In the paper, the martingales and super-martingales relative to a regular set of measures are systematically studied. The notion of local regular super-martingale relative to a set of equivalent measures is introduced and the necessary and sufficient conditions of the local regularity of it in the discrete case are founded. The regular set of measures play fundamental role for the description of incomplete markets. In the partial case, the description of the regular set of measures is presented. The notion of completeness of the regular set of measures have the important significance for the s…
The financial model proposed involves the liquidation process of a portfolio of $n$ assets through sell or (and) buy orders with volatility. We present the rigorous mathematical formulation of this model in a financial setting resulting to an $n$-dimensional outer parabolic Stefan problem with noise. In particular, our aim is to estimate for a short time period the areas of zero trading, and their diameter which approximates the minimum of the $n$ spreads of the portfolio assets for orders from the $n$ limit order books of each asset respectively. In dimensions $n=3$, and for zero volatility, …
We study the effect of investor inertia on stock price fluctuations with a market microstructure model comprising many small investors who are inactive most of the time. It turns out that semi-Markov processes are tailor made for modelling inert investors. With a suitable scaling, we show that when the price is driven by the market imbalance, the log price process is approximated by a process with long range dependence and non-Gaussian returns distributions, driven by a fractional Brownian motion. Consequently, investor inertia may lead to arbitrage opportunities for sophisticated market parti…
The choice of admissible trading strategies in mathematical modelling of financial markets is a delicate issue, going back to Harrison and Kreps (1979). In the context of optimal portfolio selection with expected utility preferences this question has been a focus of considerable attention over the last twenty years. We propose a novel notion of admissibility that has many pleasant features - admissibility is characterized purely under the objective measure; each admissible strategy can be approximated by simple strategies using finite number of trading dates; the wealth of any admissible strat…
In a semimartingale financial market model, it is shown that there is equivalence between absence of arbitrage of the first kind (a weak viability condition) and the existence of a strictly positive process that acts as a local martingale deflator on nonnegative wealth processes.
An explicit formula is derived for the value of weak information in a discrete time model that works for a wide range of utility functions including the logarithmic and power utility. We assume a complete market with a finite number of assets and a finite number of possible outcomes. Explicit calculations are performed for a binomial model with two assets. The case of trinomial models is also discussed.
