We show that wealth processes in the block-shaped order book model of Obizhaeva/Wang converge to their counterparts in the reduced-form model proposed by Almgren/Chriss, as the resilience of the order book tends to infinity. As an application of this
limit theorem, we explain how to reduce portfolio choice in highly-resilient Obizhaeva/Wang models to the corresponding problem in an Almgren/Chriss setup with small quadratic trading costs.
An investor trades a safe and several risky assets with linear price impact to maximize expected utility from terminal wealth. In the limit for small impact costs, we explicitly determine the optimal policy and welfare, in a general Markovian setting
allowing for stochastic market, cost, and preference parameters. These results shed light on the general structure of the problem at hand, and also unveil close connections to optimal execution problems and to other market frictions such as proportional and fixed transaction costs.
We investigate the general structure of optimal investment and consumption with small proportional transaction costs. For a safe asset and a risky asset with general continuous dynamics, traded with random and time-varying but small transaction costs
, we derive simple formal asymptotics for the optimal policy and welfare. These reveal the roles of the investors preferences as well as the market and cost dynamics, and also lead to a fully dynamic model for the implied trading volume. In frictionless models that can be solved in closed form, explicit formulas for the leading-order corrections due to small transaction costs are obtained.
An investor with constant absolute risk aversion trades a risky asset with general It^o-dynamics, in the presence of small proportional transaction costs. In this setting, we formally derive a leading-order optimal trading policy and the associated w
elfare, expressed in terms of the local dynamics of the frictionless optimizer. By applying these results in the presence of a random endowment, we obtain asymptotic formulas for utility indifference prices and hedging strategies in the presence of small transaction costs.
For utility maximization problems under proportional transaction costs, it has been observed that the original market with transaction costs can sometimes be replaced by a frictionless shadow market that yields the same optimal strategy and utility.
However, the question of whether or not this indeed holds in generality has remained elusive so far. In this paper we present a counterexample which shows that shadow prices may fail to exist. On the other hand, we prove that short selling constraints are a sufficient condition to warrant their existence, even in very general multi-currency market models with possibly discontinuous bid-ask-spreads.
Kramkov and Sirbu (2006, 2007) have shown that first-order approximations of power utility-based prices and hedging strategies can be computed by solving a mean-variance hedging problem under a specific equivalent martingale measure and relative to a
suitable numeraire. In order to avoid the introduction of an additional state variable necessitated by the change of numeraire, we propose an alternative representation in terms of the original numeraire. More specifically, we characterize the relevant quantities using semimartingale characteristics similarly as in Cerny and Kallsen (2007) for mean-variance hedging. These results are illustrated by applying them to exponential Levy processes and stochastic volatility models of Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard type.
