Dynamic Hedging in Incomplete Markets: A Simple Solution∗

Despite much work on hedging in incomplete markets, the literature still lacks tractable dynamic hedges in plausible environments. In this article, we provide a simple solution to this problem in a general incomplete-market economy in which a hedger, guided by the traditional minimum-variance criterion, aims at reducing the risk of a non-tradable asset. We derive fully analytical optimal hedges and demonstrate that they can easily be computed in various stochastic environments. Our dynamic hedges preserve the simple structure of complete-market perfect hedges and are in terms of generalized “Greeks,” familiar in risk management applications, as well as retaining the intuitive features of their static counterparts. We obtain our time-consistent hedges by dynamic programming, while the extant literature characterizes either static or myopic hedges, or dynamic ones that minimize the variance criterion at an initial date and from which the hedger may deviate unless she can pre-commit to follow them. We demonstrate that our dynamically optimal hedges typically outperform their static and myopic counterparts under plausible economic environments. We also show that our results can be applied to portfolio management with tracking-error. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers Numbers: G11, D81, C61.