Technical paper/Hedging
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
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…
Replication of flexi-swaps
Ingmar Evers and Farshid Jamshidian describe a relatively new product known as a flexi-swap and discuss its application in securitisation. A flexi-swap gives a counterparty an option to amortise the interest rate swap at an accelerated pace. They show…
Excess yields in bond hedging
Litterman & Scheinkman (1991) showed that the term structure of interest rates is reliablymodelled by an affine three-factor model using principal component analysis. Such a modelis inconsistent with no arbitrage. Here, Haim Reisman and Gady Zohar derive…
What’s a basket worth?
Peter Laurence and Tai-Ho Wang take a significant step in the valuation of basket options with positive and fixed weights. These model all index options, price, cap or equal weighted. Departing from the usual Black-Scholes framework, the authors provide…
All your hedges in one basket
Leif Andersen, Jakob Sidenius and Susanta Basu present new techniques for single-tranche CDO sensitivity and hedge ratio calculations. Using factorisation of the copula correlation matrix, discretisation of the conditional loss distribution followed by a…
Copula vulnerability
Counterparty credit risk
Substitute hedging
Derivatives on assets that are difficult to trade are of growing importance. Pricing suchderivatives requires the use of utility theory and proxy assets for hedging. Here, VickyHenderson and David Hobson review the theory and discuss several topical…
Himalaya options
Nothing epitomises the challenges of complex equity derivatives better than the so-called ‘mountain range’ products. In the second article looking at the challenges of this market, Marcus Overhaus analyses a particular product, the Himalayan option,…
Hedging electoral risk
New markets
Hedge your Monte Carlo
Option pricing
Going with the flow
Hedging
Stress tests and risk capital
For many financial institutions, "stress tests" are an important input into processes that set risk capital allocations. In the current regulatory environment, two distinct model-based approaches for setting regulatory capital requirements include stress…
Tailor-made for tails
Hedging strategies
Volatility swaps made simple
Volatility
On the edge of completeness
Credit derivatives
Regimes of volatility
Options markets