Consider an investment system with a nonnegative expected return in a one period economy. We show that, for an option with a given strike price, there exists a pricing interval [pC , pW ] such that replacing the original investment with the option will benefit judging by the Kelly criterion only when the price of the option lies outside of the interval. More specifically, buying call options wi...

Computing the current value of an American call option requires solving the BlackScholes PDE. The asset may be exercised at any time before its expiration date. The numerical computation involves solving this free boundary problem. A finite difference approximation leads to a linear complementarity problem with a tridiagonal matrix. What is new in this paper is an efficient technique for solvin...

A barrier option is an otherwise vanilla call or put option with a strike of X but with an extra parameter B, the barrier: the option only comes into existence (is knocked in) or is terminated (is knocked out) if the spot price crosses the barrier during the life of the option. Because there is a positive probability (in either case) of worthlessness, these options are cheaper than the correspo...

The present paper introduces new sign tests for testing for conditionally symmetric martingaledifference assumptions as well as for testing that conditional distributions of two (arbitrary) martingale-difference sequences are the same. Our analysis is based on the results that demonstrate that randomization over zero values of three-valued random variables in a conditionally symmetric martingal...

Refunding efficiency, a measure of the optimality of a refunding decision, is widely used in the call exercise decision for agency, corporate, and municipal bonds. The original definition of efficiency assumes that the refunding bond is optionless. However, in practice, the refunding bond is often callable. We show that the commonly used method of incorporating the value of the refunding bond’s...

Option theory which has dominated residential mortgage prepayment and default research implies that a borrower will exercise prepayment or default options if the call option or put option, respectively, is "in the money" by some optimal amount. Empirical research provides evidence that the financial value of the call option is strongly associated with exercise of the prepayment option, and the ...

In a competitive electricity market traditional demand side management options offering customers curtailable service at reduced rates are replaced by voluntary customer responses to electricity spot prices. In this new environment, customers wishing to ensure a fixed electricity price while taking advantage of their flexibility to curtail loads can do so by purchasing a forward electricity con...

In this work, we extend the applicability of regret minimization to pricing financial instruments, following the work of [10]. More specifically, we consider pricing a type of exotic option called a fixed-strike lookback call option. A fixed-strike lookback call option has a known expiration time, at which the option holder has the right to receive the difference between the maximal price of a ...