No Arabic abstract
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 rather than Equivalent Martingale Measures.
In [2] the notion of stickiness for stochastic processes was introduced. It was also shown that stickiness implies absense of arbitrage in a market with proportional transaction costs. In this paper, we investigate the notion of stickiness further. In particular, we give examples of processes that are not semimartingales but are sticky.
A new framework for asset price dynamics is introduced in which the concept of noisy information about future cash flows is used to derive the price processes. In this framework an asset is defined by its cash-flow structure. Each cash flow is modelled by a random variable that can be expressed as a function of a collection of independent random variables called market factors. With each such X-factor we associate a market information process, the values of which are accessible to market agents. Each information process is a sum of two terms; one contains true information about the value of the market factor; the other represents noise. The noise term is modelled by an independent Brownian bridge. The market filtration is assumed to be that generated by the aggregate of the independent information processes. The price of an asset is given by the expectation of the discounted cash flows in the risk-neutral measure, conditional on the information provided by the market filtration. When the cash flows are the dividend payments associated with equities, an explicit model is obtained for the share-price, and the prices of options on dividend-paying assets are derived. Remarkably, the resulting formula for the price of a European call option is of the Black-Scholes-Merton type. The information-based framework also generates a natural explanation for the origin of stochastic volatility.
We propose an extension of the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein (CRR) model based on q-binomial (or Kemp) random walks, with application to default with logistic failure rates. This model allows us to consider time-dependent switching probabilities varying according to a trend parameter, and it includes tilt and stretch parameters that control increment sizes. Option pricing formulas are written using q-binomial coefficients, and we study the convergence of this model to a Black-Scholes type formula in continuous time. A convergence rate of order O(1/N) is obtained when the tilt and stretch parameters are set equal to one.
We are interested in the existence of equivalent martingale measures and the detection of arbitrage opportunities in markets where several multi-asset derivatives are traded simultaneously. More specifically, we consider a financial market with multiple traded assets whose marginal risk-neutral distributions are known, and assume that several derivatives written on these assets are traded simultaneously. In this setting, there is a bijection between the existence of an equivalent martingale measure and the existence of a copula that couples these marginals. Using this bijection and recent results on improved Frechet-Hoeffding bounds in the presence of additional information, we derive sufficient conditions for the absence of arbitrage and formulate an optimization problem for the detection of a possible arbitrage opportunity. This problem can be solved efficiently using numerical optimization routines. The most interesting practical outcome is the following: we can construct a financial market where each multi-asset derivative is traded within its own no-arbitrage interval, and yet when considered together an arbitrage opportunity may arise.
In this paper, we are concerned with the valuation of Guaranteed Annuity Options (GAOs) under the most generalised modelling framework where both interest and mortality rates are stochastic and correlated. Pricing these type of options in the correlated environment is a challenging task and no closed form solution exists in the literature. We employ the use of doubly stochastic stopping times to incorporate the randomness about the time of death and employ a suitable change of measure to facilitate the valuation of survival benefit, there by adapting the payoff of the GAO in terms of the payoff of a basket call option. We derive general price bounds for GAOs by utilizing a conditioning approach for the lower bound and arithmetic-geometric mean inequality for the upper bound. The theory is then applied to affine models to present some very interesting formulae for the bounds under the affine set up. Numerical examples are furnished and benchmarked against Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the price of a GAO for a variety of affine processes governing the evolution of mortality and the interest rate.