Asia Risk/Technical paper
Information derivatives
Andrei Soklakov considers the problem of creating derivatives to provide tailored exposure to volatility risk. Information theory leads us to a whole class of such products. This class of 'information derivatives' includes standard volatility products -…
Confidence intervals for corporate default rates
Rating agency default studies provide estimates of mean default rates over multiple time horizons but have never included estimates of the standard errors of the estimates. This is due, at least in part, to the challenge of accounting for the high degree…
Counterparty risk and CCDSs under correlation
Counterparty risk under correlation is relatively unexplored in the financial literature. Damiano Brigo and Andrea Pallavicini extend previous analysis beyond swap portfolios. A stochastic-intensity jump-diffusion model is adopted for the default event,…
Market-implied Archimedean copulas
Computations of implied copulas are a central element in producing loss distributions of bespoke portfolios and pricing their tranches. This process is made feasible by the availability of index tranche pricing data. Luigi Vacca shows how it is possible…
Factor models for credit correlation
Stewart Inglis and Alex Lipton describe dynamic and static factor models for credit correlation, and show how the static model can be calibrated to the market and used for the pricing of standard and bespoke tranches, including tranchelets
A time-homogeneous, SABR-consistent extension of the LMM
Riccardo Rebonato proposes an extension of the Libor market model (LMM) that recovers the stochastic, alpha, beta, rho (SABR) caplet prices almost exactly for all strikes and maturities. The dynamics of the volatility are chosen so as to be consistent…
Gamma process dynamic modelling of credit
The existing generation of credit derivatives models is unsatisfactory because they generally contain arbitrage, cannot describe the dynamics of the process, and are hard to extend beyond vanilla products. Martin Baxter has created a new tractable family…
Calibrating and pricing with local volatility models
Cutting edge - Option pricing
The probability approach to default probability
Cutting Edge: Credit portfolio risk
Modelling inflation
Lars Kjaergaard models inflation using a three-factor Gaussian method. This gives a simple description of derivatives linked to inflation and interest rates, and allows for fast evaluation. He then shows how the model can be calibrated
Realised volatility and variance: options via swaps
Peter Carr and Roger Lee present explicit and readily applicable formulas for valuing options on realised variance and volatility. They use variance and volatility swaps - or alternatively vanilla options - as pricing benchmarks and hedging instruments…
Markovian projection for volatility calibration
Vladimir Piterbarg looks at the Markovian projection method, a way of obtaining closed-form approximations of European-style option prices on various underlyings that, in principle, is applicable to any (diffusive) model. The aim is to distil the essence…
The intrinsic currency-valuation framework
Cutting Edge: Foreign exchange
When did the JGB market become efficient?
Focusing on the deviation from the fair-yield curve, Koichi Miyazaki and Satoshi Nomura discuss the transition in efficiency observed in the Japanese government bond market and find out that the turning point was in 1996, when the Japanese repo market…
Maximum draw-down and directional trading
Maximum draw-down measures the worst drop in a market in a given time period. Jan Vecer shows how to price and replicate this event. Replication can be naturally linked to existing popular trading strategies, such as momentum or contrarian trading
Managing interest rate risk for non-maturity deposits
For many banks, non-maturity deposits represent a significant part of funding. However, there is still no commonly accepted approach to managing such deposits' interest rate risk. Marije Elkenbracht and Bert-Jan Nauta introduce two dynamic hedge…
Iterating cancellable snowballs and related exotics
Cutting edge: Exotic options
Intensity gamma
Mark Joshi and Alan Stacey develop a new model for correlation of credit defaults based on a financially intuitive concept of business time similar to that in the variance gamma model for stock price evolution
CMCDS valuation with market models
There is little, if any, literature available on constant-maturity credit default swap (CDS) valuation. Here, Damiano Brigo builds on his no-arbitrage dynamic CDS market model to derive a formula involving a 'convexity adjustment' feature correction,…
Smiling hybrids
Vladimir Piterbarg develops a multi-currency model with foreign exchange skew suitable for valuation and risk management of forex-linked hybrids, in particular power-reverse dual-currency swaps. The emphasis of the article is on model calibration to…
Counterparty risk - Wrong-way risk modelling
Cutting edge
Beyond Black-Litterman: views on non-normal markets
In normally distributed markets, the Black-Litterman technique allows managers to construct portfolios that account for their views on a set of expected returns. Attilio Meucci extends the technique to generic market distributions and shows an…
Computation methods - Smoking adjoints: fast Monte Carlo Greeks
Monte Carlo calculation of price sensitivities for hedging is often very time- consuming. Michael Giles and Paul Glasserman develop an adjoint method to accelerate the calculation. The method is particularly effective in estimating sensitivities to a…