Search results

The depth and breadth of the market for contingent claims, including exotic options, has expanded dramatically. Regulators have expressed concern regarding the risks of exotics to the financial system, due to the difficulty of hedging these instruments. Recent literature focuses on the difficulties in hedging exotic options, e.g., liquidity risk and other violations of the standard Black‐Scholes model. This article provides insight into hedging problems associated with exotic options: 1) hedging in discrete versus continuous time, 2) transaction costs, 3) stochastic volatility, and 4) non‐constant correlation. The author applies simulation analysis of these problems to a variety of exotics, including Asian options, barrier options, look‐back options, and quanto options.

This research applies a static hedging portfolio method derived from Derman, Ergener, and Kani (1995) (henceforth Derman's SHP method) and a new SHP method with European cash-or-nothing binary options developed by Chung, Shih, and Tsai (2013) to price European continuous double barrier (ECDB) options and the rebates of the ECDB options. Our numerical results indicate that the new SHP method outperforms Derman's SHP method in terms of efficiency and effectiveness under all circumstances.

The executive stock option (ESO) valuation model developed in this research amends the popular exchange traded option pricing models such as Black and Scholes (1973), Whaley (1981), and Cox, Ross, and Rubinstein (1979) to include economic features of the ESO contract that previously have been ignored. One of these features is the non‐transferability of the ESO, which creates a situation where the ESO might be exercised when an otherwise identical exchange traded option would not. Another feature is the hybrid nature of the ESO; it is not solely either an American option or a European option. The results of the comparative statics indicate that the impact of the non‐transferability of the ESO value is significant, whereas the hybrid feature of the ESO results in values that are very similar to American option values. The economic implication is that if an American or European option model is used to value ESO's, the probability is very high that a wealth transfer between management and shareholders will occur.

This study aims to examine the cross-market efficiency of the FTSE/MIB index options contracts traded on the Italian derivatives market (IDEM) during a period including the financial crisis between 1st October 2007 and 31st December 2012 using daily option prices.

Two fundamental no-arbitrage conditions were tested: the lower boundary condition (LBC) and the put–call parity (PCP) condition while taking into account the role of transaction costs in mitigating the number of violations reported. Ex post tests of LBC and PCP revealed a low incidence of mispricing in this market. Furthermore, to check the robustness of the results obtained by the ex post tests, ex ante tests were applied to PCP violations occurring within a one-day lag.

The results showed a significant drop in the number of profitable arbitrage strategies. The findings obtained from all these tests generally support the cross-market efficiency of the Italian index options market during the sample period, though some violations were occasionally reported. Overall, the number and monetary value of the violations reported declined during the post-financial crisis period compared to those during the financial crisis period.

This study can be extended to test the relationships between arbitrage profitability and other factors such as the moneyness (in the money, out of the money, at the money) of options and the maturity of options. Options market efficiency tests can be conducted such as call and put spreads, box spreads and put/call convexities (butterfly spreads).

There are several factors that influenced the decision to test the Italian index options market. First, the limited number of studies conducted on this market. Second, the fact that the two main studies on this market are relatively old, which makes it interesting to test the efficiency of this market with respect to a new set of data, taking into account the introduction of the Euro and the impact of the recent financial crisis on this market and whether the market efficiency hypothesis holds during the period of crisis. Third, it is important to consider the effect of the new rules applied to this market.

Railroad transit infrastructures are amongst major capital-intensive projects worldwide, which impose significant risks to the contractors of build-operate-transfer projects because of the fluctuations in steel price fluctuation. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for hedging steel price risk using financial derivatives.

Cox–Ross valuation lattice has been used as an option valuation model for determining option’s price for the construction companies involved in fixed-price railroad projects. A sensitivity analysis has been conducted using the financial option Greeks to evaluate the impacts of option’s pricing factors in the total price of option.

The result of valuation shows that European options cost to safeguard against the effects of price risk is only a fraction in contrast to the total cost of steel procurement for a typical railroad construction company. This confirms that using this kind of financial derivative is a beneficial yet effective approach for hedging steel price risk for railroad construction companies.

The applicability of the financial derivatives, both exchange-traded and over-the-counter instruments, is evident in broad financial industry. This paper shows how European options can be readily used for risk management of a typical railroad project, and explains the methodology in a step-by-step procedure.

Although the financial engineering literature is rife of theory and application of derivatives in various contexts, to the best knowledge of authors there is only few papers on the application of these well-developed financial instruments for risk management in construction industry. This study intends to illustrate how financial derivatives can add value to risky construction projects and shed new light in this important application area.

Option pricing is an integral part of modern financial risk management. The well-known Black and Scholes (1973) formula is commonly used for this purpose. The purpose of this paper is to extend their work to a situation in which the unconditional volatility of the original asset is increasing during a certain period of time.

The authors consider a market suffering from a financial crisis. The authors provide the solution for the equation of the underlying asset price as well as finding the hedging strategy. In addition, a closed formula of the pricing problem is proved for a particular case. Furthermore, the underlying price sensitivities are derived.

The suggested formulas are expected to make the valuation of options and the underlying hedging strategies during a financial crisis more precise. A numerical application is provided for determining the premium for a call and a put European option along with the underlying price sensitivities for each option.

An alternative option pricing model is introduced that performs better than existing ones, especially during a financial crisis.

In this study, we assume that stock prices follow piecewise geometric Brownian motion, a variant of geometric Brownian motion except the ex-dividend date, and find pricing formulas of American call options. While piecewise geometric Brownian motion can effectively incorporate discrete dividends into stock prices without losing consistency, the process results in the lack of closed-form solutions for option prices. We aim to resolve this by providing analytical approximation formulas for American call option prices under this process. Our work differs from other studies using the same assumption in at least three respects. First, we investigate the analytical approximations of American call options and examine European call options as a special case, while most analytical approximations in the literature cover only European options. Second, we provide both the upper and the lower bounds of option prices. Third, our solutions are equal to the exact price when the size of the dividend is proportional to the stock price, while binomial tree results never match the exact option price in any circumstance. The numerical analysis therefore demonstrates the efficiency of our method. Especially, the lower bound formula is accurate, and it can be further improved by considering second order approximations although it requires more computing time.