Quantitative Finance

The X-valuation adjustment (XVA) problem, which is a recent topic in mathematical finance, is considered and analyzed. First, the basic properties of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) with a random horizon in a progressively enlarged filtration are reviewed. Next, the pricing/hedging problem for defaultable over-the-counter (OTC) derivative securities is described using such BSDEs. An explicit sufficient condition is given to ensure the non-existence of an arbitrage opportunity for both the seller and buyer of the derivative securities. Furthermore, an explicit pricing formula is presented in which XVA is interpreted as approximated correction terms of the theoretical fair price.

In a stock market, the numeraire portfolio, if it exists, is the portfolio with the highest expected logarithmic growth rate at all times. A numeraire market is a stock market for which the market portfolio is the numeraire portfolio. We study open markets, markets comprising the higher capitalization stocks within a broad equity universe. The stocks we consider are represented by continuous semimartingales, and we construct an example of a numeraire market that is asymptotically stable.

We estimate prices of exotic options in a discrete-time model-free setting when the trader has access to market prices of a rich enough class of exotic and vanilla options. This is achieved by estimating an unobservable quantity called "implied expected signature" from such market prices, which are used to price other exotic derivatives. The implied expected signature is an object that characterises the market dynamics.

We use a powerful extension of the classical method of heat potentials, recently developed by the present author and his collaborators, to solve several significant problems of financial mathematics. We consider the following problems in detail: (A) calibrating the default boundary in the structural default framework to a constant default intensity; (B) calculating default probability for a representative bank in the mean-field framework; (C) finding the hitting time probability density of an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. Several other problems, including pricing American put options and finding optimal mean-reverting trading strategies, are mentioned in passing. Besides, two non-financial applications -- the supercooled Stefan problem and the integrate-and-fire neuroscience problem -- are briefly discussed as well.

In their seminal work Carr and Lee (2008) show how to robustly price and replicate a variety of claims written on the quadratic variation of a risky asset under the assumption that the asset's volatility process is independent of the Brownian motion that drives the asset's price. Additionally, they propose a correlation immunization strategy that minimizes the pricing and hedging error that results when the correlation between the risky asset's price and volatility is nonzero. In this paper, we show that the correlation immunization strategy is the only strategy among the class of strategies discussed in Carr and Lee (2008) that results in real-valued hedging portfolios when the correlation between the asset's price and volatility is nonzero. Additionally, we perform a number of Monte Carlo experiments to test the effectiveness of Carr and Lee's immunization strategy. Our results indicate that the correlation immunization method is an effective means of reducing pricing and hedging errors that result from nonzero correlation.

The present article provides an efficient and accurate hybrid method to price American standard options in certain jump-diffusion models as well as American barrier-type options under the Black & Scholes framework. Our method generalizes the quadratic approximation scheme of Barone-Adesi & Whaley (1987) and several of its extensions. Using perturbative arguments, we decompose the early exercise pricing problem into sub-problems of different orders and solve these sub-problems successively. The obtained solutions are combined to recover approximations to the original pricing problem of multiple orders, with the 0-th order version matching the general Barone-Adesi & Whaley ansatz. We test the accuracy and efficiency of the approximations via numerical simulations. The results show a clear dominance of higher order approximations over their respective 0-th order version and reveal that significantly more pricing accuracy can be obtained by relying on approximations of the first few orders. Additionally, they suggest that increasing the order of any approximation by one generally refines the pricing precision, however that this happens at the expense of greater computational costs.

In our previous paper, "A Unified Approach to Systemic Risk Measures via Acceptance Set" (\textit{Mathematical Finance, 2018}), we have introduced a general class of systemic risk measures that allow for random allocations to individual banks before aggregation of their risks. In the present paper, we prove the dual representation of a particular subclass of such systemic risk measures and the existence and uniqueness of the optimal allocation related to them. We also introduce an associated utility maximization problem which has the same optimal solution as the systemic risk measure. In addition, the optimizer in the dual formulation provides a \textit{risk allocation} which is fair from the point of view of the individual financial institutions. The case with exponential utilities which allows for explicit computation is treated in details.

Using similar assumptions as in Revuz and Yor's book we prove the existence and uniqueness of the solutions of SDEs with Lipschitz coefficients, driven by continuous, model-free price paths. The main tool in our reasonings is a model-free version of the Burkholder-Davis-Gundy inequality for integrals driven by model-free, continuous price paths.

In this paper we study the existence of an optimal hedging strategy for the shortfall risk measure in the game options setup. We consider the continuous time Black--Scholes (BS) model. Our first result says that in the case where the game contingent claim (GCC) can be exercised only on a finite set of times, there exists an optimal strategy. Our second and main result is an example which demonstrates that for the case where the GCC can be stopped on the all time interval, optimal portfolio strategies need not always exist.

We study the problem of maximising terminal utility for an agent facing model uncertainty, in a frictionless discrete-time market with one safe asset and finitely many risky assets. We show that an optimal investment strategy exists if the utility function, defined either over the positive real line or over the whole real line, is bounded from above. We further find that the boundedness assumption can be dropped provided that we impose suitable integrability conditions, related to some strengthened form of no-arbitrage. These results are obtained in an alternative framework for model uncertainty, where all possible dynamics of the stock prices are represented by a collection of stochastic processes on the same filtered probability space, rather than by a family of probability measures.