On the Hedging of American Options in Discrete Time Markets with Proportional Transaction Costs

In this note, we consider a general discrete time financial market with proportional transaction costs as in Kabanov and Stricker (2001), Kabanov et al. (2002), Kabanov et al. (2003) and Schachermayer (2004). We provide a dual formulation for the set of initial endowments which allow to super-hedge some American claim. We show that this extends the result of Chalasani and Jha (2001) which was obtained in a model with constant transaction costs and risky assets which evolve on a finite dimensional tree. We also provide fairly general conditions under which the expected formulation in terms of stopping times does not work

Strong Approximations of BSDEs in a domain

We study the strong approximation of a Backward SDE with finite stopping time horizon, namely the first exit time of a forward SDE from a cylindrical domain. We use the Euler scheme approach of Bouchard and Touzi, Zhang 04}. When the domain is piecewise smooth and under a non-characteristic boundary condition, we show that the associated strong error is at most of order h^{\frac14-\eps} where $h$ denotes the time step and \eps is any positive parameter. This rate corresponds to the strong exit time approximation. It is improved to h^{\frac12-\eps} when the exit time can be exactly simulated or for a weaker form of the approximation error. Importantly, these results are obtained without uniform ellipticity condition.Comment: 35 page

Consistent Price Systems under Model Uncertainty

We develop a version of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing for discrete-time markets with proportional transaction costs and model uncertainty. A robust notion of no-arbitrage of the second kind is defined and shown to be equivalent to the existence of a collection of strictly consistent price systems.Comment: 19 page

Stochastic Target Games and Dynamic Programming via Regularized Viscosity Solutions

We study a class of stochastic target games where one player tries to find a strategy such that the state process almost-surely reaches a given target, no matter which action is chosen by the opponent. Our main result is a geometric dynamic programming principle which allows us to characterize the value function as the viscosity solution of a non-linear partial differential equation. Because abstract mea-surable selection arguments cannot be used in this context, the main obstacle is the construction of measurable almost-optimal strategies. We propose a novel approach where smooth supersolutions are used to define almost-optimal strategies of Markovian type, similarly as in ver-ification arguments for classical solutions of Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman equations. The smooth supersolutions are constructed by an exten-sion of Krylov's method of shaken coefficients. We apply our results to a problem of option pricing under model uncertainty with different interest rates for borrowing and lending.Comment: To appear in MO

Optimal consumption in discrete-time financial models with industrial investment opportunities and nonlinear returns

We consider a general discrete-time financial market with proportional transaction costs as in [Kabanov, Stricker and R\'{a}sonyi Finance and Stochastics 7 (2003) 403--411] and [Schachermayer Math. Finance 14 (2004) 19--48]. In addition to the usual investment in financial assets, we assume that the agents can invest part of their wealth in industrial projects that yield a nonlinear random return. We study the problem of maximizing the utility of consumption on a finite time period. The main difficulty comes from the nonlinearity of the nonfinancial assets' return. Our main result is to show that existence holds in the utility maximization problem. As an intermediary step, we prove the closedness of the set $A_T$ of attainable claims under a robust no-arbitrage property similar to the one introduced in [Schachermayer Math. Finance 14 (2004) 19--48] and further discussed in [Kabanov, Stricker and R\'{a}sonyi Finance and Stochastics 7 (2003) 403--411]. This allows us to provide a dual formulation for $A_T$.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051605000000467 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Barrier Option Hedging under Constraints: A Viscosity Approach

We study the problem of finding the minimal initial capital needed in order to hedge without risk a barrier option when the vector of proportions of wealth invested in each risky asset is constraint to lie in a closed convex domain. In the context of a Brownian diffusion model, we provide a PDE characterization of the super-hedging price. This extends the result of Broadie, Cvitanic and Soner (1998) and Cvitanic, Pham and Touzi (1999) which was obtained for plain vanilla options, and provides a natural numerical procedure for computing the corresponding super-hedging price. As a by-product, we obtain a comparison theorem for a class of parabolic PDE with relaxed Dirichet conditions involving a constraint on the gradient.Super-replication, barrier options, portfolio constraints, viscosity solutions

Explicit characterization of the super-replication strategy in financial markets with partial transaction costs

We consider a continuous time multivariate financial market with proportional transaction costs and study the problem of finding the minimal initial capital needed to hedge, without risk, European-type contingent claims. The model is similar to the one considered in Bouchard and Touzi (2000) except that some of the assets can be exchanged freely, i.e. without paying transaction costs. This is the so-called non-effcient friction case. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a model is considered in a continuous time setting. In this context, we generalize the result of the above paper and prove that the super-replication price is given by the cost of the cheapest hedging strategy in which the number of non-freely exchangeable assets is kept constant over time.Transaction costs, hedging options, viscosity solutions

Robust no-free lunch with vanishing risk, a continuum of assets and proportional transaction costs

We propose a continuous time model for financial markets with proportional transactions costs and a continuum of risky assets. This is motivated by bond markets in which the continuum of assets corresponds to the continuum of possible maturities. Our framework is well adapted to the study of no-arbitrage properties and related hedging problems. In particular, we extend the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing of Guasoni, R\'asonyi and L\'epinette (2012) which concentrates on the one dimensional case. Namely, we prove that the Robust No Free Lunch with Vanishing Risk assumption is equivalent to the existence of a Strictly Consistent Price System. Interestingly, the presence of transaction costs allows a natural definition of trading strategies and avoids all the technical and un-natural restrictions due to stochastic integration that appear in bond models without friction. We restrict to the case where exchange rates are continuous in time and leave the general c\`adl\`ag case for further studies.Comment: 41 page