Price discovery
Risk institutional investor rankings 2010
The resurgence of market volatility and growing regulatory uncertainty have made the past 12 months challenging for investors. In this difficult environment, respondents to Risk’s institutional investor survey voted JP Morgan the top provider of…
Confusion over CVA
Dealers are becoming more disciplined in pricing credit – a lesson learned the hard way after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. However, banks are taking a variety of approaches, and some participants believe certain firms are habitually underpricing…
The inflation pricing conundrum
Fear of a spike in consumer prices has created greater demand for inflation protection from a variety of participants. This has increased the need for inflation pricing and analytics tools – but it is not as simple as tweaking existing models used for…
Towards a global valuation model
Banks use a variety of pricing models across business lines, creating discrepancies in the way various financial instruments are priced. But developments in high-throughput computing could lead to the possibility of a global valuation model, argue…
LCH.Clearnet considers revaluing $212 trillion swap portfolio
LCH.Clearnet could start using overnight indexed swap (OIS) rate curves rather than Libor to value its roughly $212 trillion swap portfolio, in response to changing market practice.
RBS fined £29 million for sharing pricing information
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has settled with the OFT for breaking competition rules with Barclays
The price is wrong
As the basis between Libor and overnight index swap rates ballooned during the credit crisis, banks were forced to reassess methods for pricing collateralised and uncollateralised derivatives trades. The result is a move towards a new market standard in…
Funding beyond discounting: collateral agreements and derivatives pricing
Standard theory assumes traders can lend and borrow at a risk-free rate, ignoring the intricacies of the repo and collateralisation markets. Here, Vladimir Piterbarg shows that these force adjustments to discounting, forward prices and implied…
UPDATED: Nymex follows Saudi sour crude endorsement with new contracts
Nymex is to launch two sour crude oil contracts after Saudi Aramco’s announcement this week that it will use the Argus Sour Crude Index (ASCI) as a benchmark for US sales from January 2010.
Less complexity for pricing analytics
A number of software suppliers sprang up in the early part of the decade offering pricing and analytics software for ever more complex derivatives structures. In the new age of less complexity, how are these firms adapting? By Clive Davidson
Parameter estimation with k-means clustering
Ever since the pioneering work of Cox, Ross & Rubinstein (1979), tree models have been popular as an asset pricing method. However, statistical estimation of the parameters of tree models has been less studied. In this article, Kiseop Lee and Mingxin Xu…
Truth and responsibility
The meltdown in subprime collateralised debt obligations will affect financial markets for years. One likely result will be a renewed market willingness to reward sound credit underwriting - and therein lies a valuable business opportunity, argues David…
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…
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…
The real value of stock
Collars involve the payment of a variable amount of stock, depending on an average stock price. In this article, Anthony Pavlovich uses the Black-Scholes framework to value these exotic derivatives and explore issues with hedging, as well as providing an…
Asian basket spreads and other exotic averaging options
Giuseppe Castellacci and Michael Siclari of OpenLink introduce a class of exotic options that simultaneously generalises both Asian and basket options. They develop approximate analytic models for real-time pricing of complex instruments that average…
US gas market challenges
A new report from the investigative office of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finds that competitive natural gas markets in the US are robust, but warns of challenges ahead. Kevin Foster reports
Unified Asian pricing
Options
Mean-reverting smiles
Commodity markets such as crude oil exhibit mean reversion as well as option smiles. The authors construct a model suitable for pricing exotic options in these markets
Forward CMS rate adjustment
Constant maturity products
The taming of the skew
Implied volatility
Jumping smiles
Options