The continuous behavior of the numeraire portfolio under small changes in information structure, probabilistic views and investment constraints

The numeraire portfolio in a financial market is the unique positive wealth process that makes all other nonnegative wealth processes, when deflated by it, supermartingales. The numeraire portfolio depends on market characteristics, which include: (a) the information flow available to acting agents, given by a filtration; (b) the statistical evolution of the asset prices and, more generally, the states of nature, given by a probability measure; and (c) possible restrictions that acting agents might be facing on available investment strategies, modeled by a constraints set. In a financial market with continuous-path asset prices, we establish the stable behavior of the numeraire portfolio when each of the aforementioned market parameters is changed in an infinitesimal way.Comment: 16 pages; revised versio

Stochastic discount factors

The valuation process that economic agents undergo for investments with uncertain payoff typically depends on their statistical views on possible future outcomes, their attitudes toward risk, and, of course, the payoff structure itself. Yields vary across different investment opportunities and their interrelations are difficult to explain. For the same agent, a different discounting factor has to be used for every separate valuation occasion. If, however, one is ready to accept discounting that varies randomly with the possible outcomes, and therefore accepts the concept of a stochastic discount factor, then an economically consistent theory can be developed. Asset valuation becomes a matter of randomly discounting payoffs under different states of nature and weighing them according to the agent's probability structure. The advantages of this approach are obvious, since a single discounting mechanism suffices to describe how any asset is priced by the agent.Comment: 12 pages. To appear in the "Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance

Valuation and parities for exchange options

Valuation and parity formulas for both European-style and American-style exchange options are presented in a general financial model allowing for jumps, possibility of default and "bubbles" in asset prices. The formulas are given via expectations of auxiliary probabilities using the change-of-numeraire technique. Extensive discussion is provided regarding the way that folklore results such as Merton's no-early-exercise theorem and traditional parity relations have to be altered in this more versatile framework.Comment: 19 page

Free Lunch

The concept of absence of opportunities for free lunches is one of the pillars in the economic theory of financial markets. This natural assumption has proved very fruitful and has lead to great mathematical, as well as economical, insights in Quantitative Finance. Formulating rigorously the exact definition of absence of opportunities for riskless profit turned out to be a highly non-trivial fact that troubled mathematicians and economists for at least two decades. The purpose of this note is to give a quick (and, necessarily, incomplete) account of the recent work aimed at providing a simple and intuitive no-free-lunch assumption that would suffice in formulating a version of the celebrated Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing.Comment: 3 pages; a version of this note will appear in the Encyclopaedia of Quantitative Finance, John Wiley and Sons In

Finitely additive probabilities and the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing

This work aims at a deeper understanding of the mathematical implications of the economically-sound condition of absence of arbitrages of the first kind in a financial market. In the spirit of the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing (FTAP), it is shown here that absence of arbitrages of the first kind in the market is equivalent to the existence of a finitely additive probability, weakly equivalent to the original and only locally countably additive, under which the discounted wealth processes become "local martingales". The aforementioned result is then used to obtain an independent proof of the FTAP of Delbaen and Schachermayer. Finally, an elementary and short treatment of the previous discussion is presented for the case of continuous-path semimartingale asset-price processes.Comment: 14 pages. Dedicated to Prof. Eckhard Platen, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. This is the 2nd part of what comprised the older arxiv submission arXiv:0904.179

On the stochastic behaviour of optional processes up to random times

In this paper, a study of random times on filtered probability spaces is undertaken. The main message is that, as long as distributional properties of optional processes up to the random time are involved, there is no loss of generality in assuming that the random time is actually a randomised stopping time. This perspective has advantages in both the theoretical and practical study of optional processes up to random times. Applications are given to financial mathematics, as well as to the study of the stochastic behaviour of Brownian motion with drift up to its time of overall maximum as well as up to last-passage times over finite intervals. Furthermore, a novel proof of the Jeulin-Yor decomposition formula via Girsanov's theorem is provided.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AAP976 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org