Quantitative Finance

We re-examine and extend the findings from the recent paper by Dumitrescu, Quenez and Sulem (2018) who studied American and game options in a particular market model using the nonlinear arbitrage-free pricing approach developed in El Karoui and Quenez (1997). In the first part, we provide a detailed study of unilateral valuation problems for the two counterparties in an American-style contract within the framework of a general nonlinear market. We extend results from Bielecki and Rutkowski (2015) and Bielecki, Cialenco and Rutkowski (2018) who examined the case of a European-style contract. In the second part, we present a BSDE approach, which is used to establish more explicit pricing, hedging and exercising results when solutions to reflected BSDEs have additional desirable properties.

We call a given American option representable if there exists a European claim which dominates the American payoff at any time and such that the values of the two options coincide in the continuation region of the American option. This concept has interesting implications from a probabilistic, analytic, financial, and numeric point of view. Relying on methods from Jourdain and Martini (2001, 2002), Chrsitensen (2014) and convex duality, we make a first step towards verifying representability of American options.

The study efforts to explore and extend the crisis predictability by synthetically reviewing and comparing a full mixture of early warning models into two constitutions: crisis identifications and predictive models. Given empirical results on Chinese currency and stock markets, three-strata findings are concluded as (i) the SWARCH model conditional on an elastic thresholding methodology can most accurately classify crisis observations and greatly contribute to boosting the predicting precision, (ii) stylized machine learning models are preferred given higher precision in predicting and greater benefit in practicing, (iii) leading factors sign the crisis in a diversified way for different types of markets and varied prediction periods.

We describe the bailout of banks by governments as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) where the actions are equity investments. The underlying dynamics is derived from the network of financial institutions linked by mutual exposures, and the negative rewards are associated to the banks' default. Each node represents a bank and is associated to a probability of default per unit time (PD) that depends on its capital and is increased by the default of neighbouring nodes. Governments can control the systemic risk of the network by providing additional capital to the banks, lowering their PD at the expense of an increased exposure in case of their failure. Considering the network of European global systemically important institutions, we find the optimal investment policy that solves the MDP, providing direct indications to governments and regulators on the best way of action to limit the effects of financial crises.

In this paper, we document a novel machine learning based bottom-up approach for static and dynamic portfolio optimization on, potentially, a large number of assets. The methodology applies to general constrained optimization problems and overcomes many major difficulties arising in current optimization schemes. Taking mean-variance optimization as an example, we no longer need to compute the covariance matrix and its inverse, therefore the method is immune from the estimation error on this quantity. Moreover, no explicit calls of optimization routines are needed. Applications to equity portfolio management in U.S. and China equity markets are studied and we document significant excess returns to the selected benchmarks.

We study asset price bubbles in market models with proportional transaction costs λ∈(0,1) and finite time horizon T in the setting of [49]. By following [28], we define the fundamental value F of a risky asset S as the price of a super-replicating portfolio for a position terminating in one unit of the asset and zero cash. We then obtain a dual representation for the fundamental value by using the super-replication theorem of [50]. We say that an asset price has a bubble if its fundamental value differs from the ask-price (1+λ)S . We investigate the impact of transaction costs on asset price bubbles and show that our model intrinsically includes the birth of a bubble.

The relationship between price volatilty and a market extremum is examined using a fundamental economics model of supply and demand. By examining randomness through a microeconomic setting, we obtain the implications of randomness in the supply and demand, rather than assuming that price has randomness on an empirical basis. Within a very general setting the volatility has an extremum that precedes the extremum of the price. A key issue is that randomness arises from the supply and demand, and the variance in the stochastic differential equation govening the logarithm of price must reflect this. Analogous results are obtained by further assuming that the supply and demand are dependent on the deviation from fundamental value of the asset.

This paper studies the equilibrium price of an asset that is traded in continuous time between N agents who have heterogeneous beliefs about the state process underlying the asset's payoff. We propose a tractable model where agents maximize expected returns under quadratic costs on inventories and trading rates. The unique equilibrium price is characterized by a weakly coupled system of linear parabolic equations which shows that holding and liquidity costs play dual roles. We derive the leading-order asymptotics for small transaction and holding costs which give further insight into the equilibrium and the consequences of illiquidity.

This paper investigates a financial market where stock returns depend on a hidden Gaussian mean reverting drift process. Information on the drift is obtained from returns and expert opinions in the form of noisy signals about the current state of the drift arriving at the jump times of a homogeneous Poisson process. Drift estimates are based on Kalman filter techniques and described by the conditional mean and covariance matrix of the drift given the observations. We study the filter asymptotics for increasing arrival intensity of expert opinions and prove that the conditional mean is a consistent drift estimator, it converges in the mean-square sense to the hidden drift. Thus, in the limit as the arrival intensity goes to infinity investors have full information about the drift.

This paper studies the portfolio optimization problem when the investor's utility is general and the return and volatility of the risky asset are fast mean-reverting, which are important to capture the fast-time scale in the modeling of stock price volatility. Motivated by the heuristic derivation in [J.-P. Fouque, R. Sircar and T. Zariphopoulou, \emph{Mathematical Finance}, 2016], we propose a zeroth order strategy, and show its asymptotic optimality within a specific (smaller) family of admissible strategies under proper assumptions. This optimality result is achieved by establishing a first order approximation of the problem value associated to this proposed strategy using singular perturbation method, and estimating the risk-tolerance functions. The results are natural extensions of our previous work on portfolio optimization in a slowly varying stochastic environment [J.-P. Fouque and R. Hu, \emph{SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization}, 2017], and together they form a whole picture of analyzing portfolio optimization in both fast and slow environments.