Technical paper
Purchase timing
Managing purchase timing risk is a constant issue for wholesale power buyers. Pavel Diko reviews products that reduce this risk, proposes a lookback option that can eliminate it completely and outlines a hedging strategy for the option writer
Equity risk at the horizon
Technical papers
The intrinsic currency-valuation framework
Cutting Edge: Foreign exchange
Credit risk contagion
In a recession, company defaults increase due to both the worsening economic environment and the specific links between customers and suppliers. Banks intuitively know that customer default can cause supplier default. Duncan Martin and Chris Marrison…
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…
Electricity-backed security: concepts and measures
John Jiang and Hanjie Chen propose a generic concept ofelectricity-backed security, which provides an additionalfunding method to utilities with poorer credit ratings,and a new asset class to investors
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…
The vanna-volga method for implied volatilities
Cutting Edge - Option pricing
Default and recovery correlations - a dynamic econometric approach
Integrating coherences between defaults and loss given default (LGD) is postulated by Basel II. If there is a positive correlation between the two, separate models for each lead to biased estimates for the LGD parameters, and the economic loss is…
Variance swaps under no conditions
Conditional variance swaps are claims on realised variance that is accumulated when the underlying asset price stays within a certain range. Being highly sensitive to movements in both asset price and its variance, they require a very reliable model for…