In December 2005, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved margin rules for complex option spreads with 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12 legs. Only option spreads with 2, 3 or 4 legs were recognized before. Taking advantage of option spreads with a large number of legs substantially reduces margin requirements and, at the same time, adequately estimates risk for margin accounts with positio...

These notes survey some aspects of discrete-time chaotic calculus and its applications, based on the chaos representation property for i.i.d. sequences of random variables. The topics covered include the Clark formula and predictable representation, anticipating calculus, covariance identities and functional inequalities (such as deviation and logarithmic Sobolev inequalities), and an applicati...

Recent work by Nualart and Schoutens (2000), where a kind of chaotic property for Lévy processes has been proved, has enabled us to develop a Malliavin calculus for Lévy processes. For simple Lévy processes some useful formulas for computing Malliavin derivatives are deduced. Applications for option hedging in a jump–diffusion model are given.

The Trapezoidal Rule with second order Backward Difference Formula (TR-BDF2) time stepping method was applied to the Black-Scholes PDE for option pricing. It is proved that TR-BDF2 time stepping method is unconditionally stable, and compared to the usual Crank-Nicolson time stepping method, the TR-BDF2 shows fewer oscillations when computing the derivatives of the solution, which are important ...

Within a Markovian complete financial market, we consider the problem of hedging a Bermudan option with a given probability. Using stochastic target and duality arguments, we derive a backward algorithm for the Fenchel transform of the pricing function. This algorithm is similar to the usual American backward induction, except that it requires two additional Fenchel transformations at each exer...

In this paper we give a brief, elementary introduction to various aspects of financial engineering. Specific topics discussed include the determination of a fair price for an option or other derivative instrument, hedging strategies, etc. We also discuss what role, if any, financial engineering has played in the current financial crisis.

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 (...

This paper introduces a financial hedging model for global environment risks. Our approach is based on portfolio insurance under hedging constraints. Investors are assumed to maximize their expected utilities defined on financial and environmental asset values. The optimal investment is determined for quite general utility functions and hedging constraints. In particular, our results suggest ho...

We introduce a new class of strategies for hedging derivative securities in the presence of transaction costs assuming lognormal continuous time prices for the underlying asset We do not assume necessarily that the payo is convex as in Leland or that transaction costs are small compared to the price changes between portfolio adjustments as in Hoggard Whalley and Wilmott The type of hedging stra...

We develop a theory for option pricing with perfect hedging in an inefficient market model where the underlying price variations are autocorrelated over a time τ ≥ 0. This is accomplished by assuming that the underlying noise in the system is derived by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, rather than from a Wiener process. With a modified portfolio consisting in calls, secondary calls and bonds we achieve a...