Time-invariant portfolio strategies in structured products with guaranteed minimum equity exposure

We introduce a new exotic option to be used within structured products to address a key disadvantage of standard time-invariant portfolio protection: the well-known cash-lock risk. Our approach suggests enriching the framework by including a threshold in the allocation mechanism so that a guaranteed minimum equity exposure (GMEE) is ensured at any point in time. To be able to offer such a solution still with hard capital protection, we apply an option-based structure with a dynamic allocation logic as underlying. We provide an in-depth analysis of the prices of such new exotic options, assuming a Heston–Vasicek-type financial market model, and compare our results with other options used within structured products. Our approach represents an interesting alternative for investors aiming at downsizing protection via time-invariant portfolio protection strategies, meanwhile being also afraid to experience a cash-lock event triggered by market turmoils.     

投资组合保险CPPI策略研究

随着期权理论应用的发展,投资组合保险在国外已成为一种盛行的资产配置策略, 常数比例投资组合保险策略(CPPI)以其模型简单、参数的设置又能充分反映投资人不同的风险偏好、而且易于实施,成为大型安全型基金的基金经理首选的投资策略.本文研究并推广了CPPI策略,找出CPPI与期权的关系,讨论了借贷限制对(CPPI策略的影响,最后对CPPI策略在中国市场的可投资性进行了评测.     

基于随机模糊投资乘数的离散CPPI资产配置研究

以传统CPPI投资策略的分析框架为基础,在风险资产为连续价格波动的条件下,构建离散投资决策时点的CPPI投资策略。引入模糊决策的分析方法度量投资决策者的心理预期,将传统CPPI投资策略中的投资乘数修正为随机模糊投资乘数,采用马尔科夫链蒙特卡洛模拟风险资产未来市场价格,利用模糊隶属函数描述投资决策者对未来市场运行状况预期的不确定性,保证即使投资决策者预期不精确的条件下,也能保证离散CPPI投资策略获得相对稳定的投资效果。利用中国证券市场上的真实数据进行实证检验,认为:随机模糊投资乘数最大限度地涵盖了投资决策者主观预测的不确定性;基于随机模糊投资乘数的离散CPPI投资策略在不同的市场运行状况中,较传统的CPPI投资策略更具投资的灵活性,可以在保证投资保险的前提下,追求较高的投资收益。     

Portfolio insurance: Gap risk under conditional multiples

The research on financial portfolio optimization has been originally developed by Markowitz (1952). It has been further extended in many directions, among them the portfolio insurance theory introduced by Leland and Rubinstein (1976) for the “Option Based Portfolio Insurance” (OBPI) and Perold (1986) for the “Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance” method (CPPI). The recent financial crisis has dramatically emphasized the interest of such portfolio strategies. This paper examines the CPPI method when the multiple is allowed to vary over time. To control the risk of such portfolio management, a quantile approach is introduced together with expected shortfall criteria. In this framework, we provide explicit upper bounds on the multiple as function of past asset returns and volatilities. These values can be statistically estimated from financial data, using for example ARCH type models. We show how the multiple can be chosen in order to satisfy the guarantee condition, at a given level of probability and for various financial market conditions.     

For what trading strategies is the tax payment stream of infinite variation?

For an Itô asset price process and under quite mild structural assumptions, we show that the accumulated payments of a linear tax on trading gains are of infinite variation if the quadratic covariation of the trading strategy and the asset price is negative. By contrast, if the strategy is a smooth function of the asset price and some finite variation processes with positive partial derivative with respect to the price variable, then accumulated tax payments are of finite variation. An interesting example are constant proportion portfolio insurance (CPPI) strategies which we extend to models with capital gains taxes. The associated tax payment stream is of finite variation if the tax-adjusted constant multiple of the cushion which is invested in the risky asset is bigger or equal to one. Otherwise, it is of infinite variation.     

离散时间投资组合保险策略CPPI及其实证分析

本文重点讨论了在离散时刻对投资组合进行调整的CPPI策略.给出了组合价值的过程表达式,并对其进行风险分析;引入二次期望效用函数,给出了确定CPPI策略中最优乘数的方法;讨论了借贷限制对CPPI策略的影响并将其与买入持有策略进行比较分析。最后,文章对CPPI策略的投资效果进行了实证分析.     

Stochastic equity volatility related to the leverage effect II: valuation of European equity options and warrants

We propose a general framework to assess the value of the financial claims issued by the firm, European equity options and warrantsin terms of the stock price. In our framework, the firm's asset is assumed to follow a standard stationary lognormal process with constant volatility. However, it is not the case for equity volatility. The stochastic nature of equity volatility is endogenous, and comes from the impact of a change in the value of the firm's assets on the financial leverage. In a previous paper we studied the stochastic process for equity volatility, and proposed analytic approximations for different capital structures. In this companion paper we derive analytic approximations for the value of European equity options and warrants for a firm financed by equity, debt and warrants. We first present the basic model, which is an extension of the Black-Scholes model, to value corporate securities either as a function of the stock price, or as a function of the firm's total assets. Since stock prices are observable, then for practical purposes, traders prefer to use the stock as the underlying instrument, we concentrate on valuation models in terms of the stock price. Second, we derive an exact solution for the valuation in terms of the stock price of (i) a European call option on the stock of a levered firm, i.e. a European compound call option on the total assets of the firm, (ii) an equity warrant for an all-equity firm, and (iii) an equity warrant for a firm financed by equity and debt. Unfortunately, to compute these solutions we need to specify the function of the stock price in terms of the firm's assets value. In general we are unable to specify this expression, but we propose tight bounds for the value of these options which can be easily computed as a function of the stock price. Our results provide useful extensions of the Black-Scholes model.     

On smoothing of the Crank–Nicolson scheme and higher order schemes for pricing barrier options

Most option pricing problems have nonsmooth payoffs or discontinuous derivatives at the exercise price. Discrete barrier options have not only nonsmooth payoffs but also time dependent discontinuities. In pricing barrier options, certain aspects are triggered if the asset price becomes too high or too low. Standard smoothing schemes used to solve problems with nonsmooth payoff do not work well for discrete barrier options because of discontinuities introduced in the time domain when each barrier is applied. Moreover, these unwanted oscillations become worse when estimating the hedging parameters, e.g., Delta and Gamma. We have an improved smoothing strategy for the Crank–Nicolson method which is unique in achieving optimal order convergence for barrier option problems. Numerical experiments are discussed for one asset and two asset problems. Time evolution graphs are obtained for one asset problems to show how option prices change with respect to time. This smoothing strategy is then extended to higher order methods using diagonal (m,m)$(m,m)$—Padé main schemes under a smoothing strategy of using as damping schemes the (0,2m-1)$(0,2m-1)$ subdiagonal Padé schemes.     

常数比例投资组合保险(CPPI)策略 --捐赠型基金投资策略的最优选择

本文采用Merton提出的处理捐赠型基金的连续时间模型的一般框架，分析了在风险资产为几何布朗运动，效用函数为CRRA效用函数，且捐赠型基金有动态最低支出时的最优支出策略和最优投资策略，结果表明存在一条策略基准线，当基金的总资产在策略基准线之上时，基金管理人关于基金支出与投资策略的选择与不存在最低支出的要求时所作出的决策是一样的，但是一旦基金的总资产低于这条策略基准线时，基金管理人便需要考虑到基金将来必要的支出，并实际影响到他对投资策略的选择，此时基金管理人可作的最优选择是：最低的支出和一种为复制幂收益函数期权的CPPI投资策略。     

Efficient smoothing of Crank-Nicolson method for pricing barrier options under stochastic volatility

Most of the option pricing problems have nonsmooth payoff. In barrier options certain aspects of the option are triggered if the asset price becomes too high or too low. Standard smoothing schemes used to solve problems with nonsmooth payoff do not work well for the barrier option because a discontinuity is introduced in the time domain each time a barrier is applied. An improved smoothing strategy is introduced for smoothing the A -stable Cranck-Nicolson scheme at each time when a barrier is applied. A partial differential equation (PDE) approach is utilized for the evaluation of complex option pricing models under stochastic volatility which brings major mathematical and computational challenges for estimation and stability of the estimates. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

A simple model of deferred callability in defaultable debt

Banks and other financial institutions issue hybrid capital as part of their risk capital. Hybrid capital has no maturity, but, similarly to most corporate debt, includes an embedded issuer’s call option. To obtain acceptance as risk capital, the first possible exercise date of the embedded call is contractually deferred by several years, generating a protection period. We value the call feature as a European option on perpetual defaultable debt. We do this by first modifying the underlying asset process to incorporate a time-dependent bankruptcy level before the expiration of the embedded option. We identify a call option on debt as a fixed number of put options on a modified asset, which is lognormally distributed, as opposed to the market value of debt. To include the possibility of default before the expiration of the option we apply barrier options results. The formulas are quite general and may be used for valuing both embedded and third-party options. All formulas are developed in the seminal and standard Black–Scholes–Merton model and, thus, standard analytical tools such as ‘the greeks’, are immediately available.     

Risk-neutral valuation of power barrier options

Barrier options are standard exotic options traded in the financial market. These instruments are different from the vanilla options as the payoff of the option depends on whether the underlying asset price reaches a predetermined barrier level, during the life of the option. In this work, we extend the vanilla call barrier options to power call barrier options where the underlying asset price is raised to a constant power, within the standard Black–Scholes framework. It is demonstrated that the pricing of the power barrier options can be obtained from standard barrier options by a transformation which involves the power contract and a adjusted barrier. Numerical results are considered.     

Lie-algebraic approach for pricing moving barrier options with time-dependent parameters

In this paper we apply the Lie-algebraic technique for the valuation of moving barrier options with time-dependent parameters. The value of the underlying asset is assumed to follow the constant elasticity of variance (CEV) process. By exploiting the dynamical symmetry of the pricing partial differential equations, the new approach enables us to derive the analytical kernels of the pricing formulae straightforwardly, and thus provides an efficient way for computing the prices of the moving barrier options. The method is also able to provide tight upper and lower bounds for the exact prices of CEV barrier options with fixed barriers. In view of the CEV model being empirically considered to be a better candidate in equity option pricing than the traditional Black-Scholes model, our new approach could facilitate more efficient comparative pricing and precise risk management in equity derivatives with barriers by incorporating term-structures of interest rates, volatility and dividend into the CEV option valuation model.     

Stochastic dominance of portfolio insurance strategies

The purpose of this article is to analyze and compare two standard portfolio insurance methods: Option-based Portfolio Insurance (OBPI) and Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance (CPPI). Various stochastic dominance criteria up to third order are considered. We derive parameter conditions implying the second- and third-order stochastic dominance of the CPPI strategy. In particular, restrictions on the CPPI multiplier resulting from the spread between the implied volatility and the empirical volatility are analyzed.     

Sharp distribution free lower bounds for spread options and the corresponding optimal subreplicating portfolios

We derive in closed form distribution free lower bounds and optimal subreplicating strategies for spread options in a one-period static arbitrage setting. In the case of a continuum of strikes, we complement the optimal lower bound for spread options obtained in [Rapuch, G., Roncalli, T., 2002. Pricing multiasset options and credit derivatives with copula, Credit Lyonnais, Working Papers] by describing its corresponding subreplicating strategy. This result is explored numerically in a Black-Scholes and in a CEV setting. In the case of discrete strikes, we solve in closed form the optimization problem in which, for each asset S₁ and S₂, forward prices and the price of one option are used as constraints on the marginal distributions of each asset. We provide a partial solution in the case where the marginal distributions are constrained by two strikes per asset. Numerical results on real NYMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange) crack spread option data show that the one discrete lower bound can be far and also very close to the traded price. In addition, the one strike closed form solution is very close to the two strike.     

Robust option pricing

In this paper, we combine robust optimization and the idea of ?$?$-arbitrage to propose a tractable approach to price a wide variety of options. Rather than assuming a probabilistic model for the stock price dynamics, we assume that the conclusions of probability theory, such as the central limit theorem, hold deterministically on the underlying returns. This gives rise to an uncertainty set that the underlying asset returns satisfy. We then formulate the option pricing problem as a robust optimization problem that identifies the portfolio which minimizes the worst case replication error for a given uncertainty set defined on the underlying asset returns. The most significant benefits of our approach are (a) computational tractability illustrated by our ability to price multi-asset, American and Asian options using linear optimization; and thus the computational complexity of our approach scales polynomially with the number of assets and with time to expiry and (b) modeling flexibility illustrated by our ability to model different kinds of options, various levels of risk aversion among investors, transaction costs, shorting constraints and replication via option portfolios.     

Pricing and Hedging of Lookback Options in Hyper-exponential Jump Diffusion Models

ABSTRACT

In this article, we consider the problem of pricing lookback options in certain exponential Lévy market models. While in the classic Black-Scholes models the price of such options can be calculated in closed form, for more general asset price model, one typically has to rely on (rather time-intense) Monte-Carlo or partial (integro)-differential equation (P(I)DE) methods. However, for Lévy processes with double exponentially distributed jumps, the lookback option price can be expressed as one-dimensional Laplace transform (cf. Kou, S. G., Petrella, G., & Wang, H. (2005). Pricing path-dependent options with jump risk via Laplace transforms. The Kyoto Economic Review, 74(9), 1–23.). The key ingredient to derive this representation is the explicit availability of the first passage time distribution for this particular Lévy process, which is well-known also for the more general class of hyper-exponential jump diffusions (HEJDs). In fact, Jeannin and Pistorius (Jeannin, M., & Pistorius, M. (2010). A transform approach to calculate prices and Greeks of barrier options driven by a class of Lévy processes. Quntitative Finance, 10(6), 629–644.) were able to derive formulae for the Laplace transformed price of certain barrier options in market models described by HEJD processes. Here, we similarly derive the Laplace transforms of floating and fixed strike lookback option prices and propose a numerical inversion scheme, which allows, like Fourier inversion methods for European vanilla options, the calculation of lookback options with different strikes in one shot. Additionally, we give semi-analytical formulae for several Greeks of the option price and discuss a method of extending the proposed method to generalized hyper-exponential (as e.g. NIG or CGMY) models by fitting a suitable HEJD process. Finally, we illustrate the theoretical findings by some numerical experiments.     

A note on convergence of an approximate hedging portfolio with liquidity risk

When the underlying asset price depends on activities of traders, hedging errors include costs due to the illiquidity of the underlying asset and the size of this cost can be substantial. Cetin et al. (2004), Liquidity risk and arbitrage pricing theory, Finance and Stochastics, 8(3), 311-341, proposed a hedging strategy that approximates the classical Black–Scholes hedging strategy and produces zero liquidity costs. Here, we compute the rate of convergence of the final value of this hedging portfolio to the option payoff in case of a European call option; i.e. we see how fast its hedging error converges to zero. The hedging strategy studied here is meaningful due to its simple liquidity cost structure and its smoothness relative to the classical Black–Scholes delta.     

Pricing Asian options of discretely monitored geometric average in the regime‐switching model

This paper provides analytic pricing formulas of discretely monitored geometric Asian options under the regime‐switching model. We derive the joint Laplace transform of the discount factor, the log return of the underlying asset price at maturity, and the logarithm of the geometric mean of the asset price. Then using the change of measures and the inversion of the transform, the prices and deltas of a fixed‐strike and a floating‐strike geometric Asian option are obtained. As the numerical results, we calculate the price of a fixed‐strike and a floating‐strike discrete geometric Asian call option using our formulas and compare with the results of the Monte Carlo simulation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Option pricing bounds with standard risk aversion preferences

For a theoretical valuation of a financial option, various models have been proposed that require specific hypotheses regarding both the stochastic process driving the price behaviour of the underlying security and market efficiency. When some of these assumptions are removed, we obtain an uncertainty interval for the option price. Up to now, the most restrictive intervals for option prices have been obtained using the decreasing absolute risk aversion (DARA) rule in a state-preference approach. Precautionary saving entails the concept of prudence; in particular, decreasing absolute prudence is a necessary and sufficient condition that guarantees that the saving of wealthier people is less sensitive to the risk associated to future incomes. If this condition is coupled with the DARA assumption we obtain standard risk aversion (SRA), which guarantees on the one hand that introducing a zero-mean background risk to wealth makes people less willing to accept another independent risk and on the other hand that an increase in the risk of the returns distribution of an asset reduces the demand for this asset. The main idea of this contribution is to apply decreasing absolute prudence and SRA rules in a state-preference context in order to obtain efficient bounds for the value of European-style options portfolio strategies. Lower and upper bounds for the options portfolio value are obtained by solving non-linear optimization problems. The numerical experiments carried out show the efficiency of the technique proposed.