Robust pricing and hedging under trading restrictions and the emergence of local martingale models

We consider the pricing of derivatives in a setting with trading restrictions, but without any probabilistic assumptions on the underlying model, in discrete and continuous time. In particular, we assume that European put or call options are traded at certain maturities, and the forward price implied by these option prices may be strictly decreasing in time. In discrete time, when call options are traded, the short-selling restrictions ensure no arbitrage, and we show that classical duality holds between the smallest super-replication price and the supremum over expectations of the payoff over all supermartingale measures. More surprisingly in the case where the only vanilla options are put options, we show that there is a duality gap. Embedding the discrete time model into a continuous time setup, we make a connection with (strict) local-martingale models, and derive framework and results often seen in the literature on financial bubbles. This connection suggests a certain natural interpretation of many existing results in the literature on financial bubbles

Growth Optimal Investment and Pricing of Derivatives

We introduce a criterion how to price derivatives in incomplete markets, based on the theory of growth optimal strategy in repeated multiplicative games. We present reasons why these growth-optimal strategies should be particularly relevant to the problem of pricing derivatives. We compare our result with other alternative pricing procedures in the literature, and discuss the limits of validity of the lognormal approximation. We also generalize the pricing method to a market with correlated stocks. The expected estimation error of the optimal investment fraction is derived in a closed form, and its validity is checked with a small-scale empirical test.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure

A fundamental theorem of asset pricing for continuous time large financial markets in a two filtration setting

We present a version of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing (FTAP) for continuous time large financial markets with two filtrations in an $L^p$-setting for $1 \leq p < \infty$. This extends the results of Yuri Kabanov and Christophe Stricker \cite{KS:06} to continuous time and to a large financial market setting, however, still preserving the simplicity of the discrete time setting. On the other hand it generalizes Stricker's $L^p$-version of FTAP \cite{S:90} towards a setting with two filtrations. We do neither assume that price processes are semi-martigales, (and it does not follow due to trading with respect to the \emph{smaller} filtration) nor that price processes have any path properties, neither any other particular property of the two filtrations in question, nor admissibility of portfolio wealth processes, but we rather go for a completely general (and realistic) result, where trading strategies are just predictable with respect to a smaller filtration than the one generated by the price processes. Applications range from modeling trading with delayed information, trading on different time grids, dealing with inaccurate price information, and randomization approaches to uncertainty

Infinitely many securities and the fundamental theorem of asset pricing

Several authors have pointed out the possible absence of martingale measures for static arbitrage-free markets with an infinite number of available securities. This paper addresses this caveat by drawing on projective systems of probability measures. Firstly, it is shown that there are two distinct sorts of models whose treatment is necessarily different. Secondly, and more important, we analyze those situations for which one can provide a projective system of ó .additive measures whose projective limit may be interpreted as a risk-neutral probability. Hence, the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing is extended so that it can apply for models with infinitely many assets