A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Study bounds for prices of European and American options with optional termination.
In this work, we consider the problem of autonomously discovering behavioral abstractions, or options, for reinforcement learning agents. We propose an algorithm that focuses on the termination condition, as opposed to -- as is common -- the policy. The termination condition is usually trained to optimize a control obj…
Is an option to early terminate a swap at its market value worth zero? At first sight it is, but in presence of counterparty risk it depends on the criteria used to determine such market value. In case of a single uncollateralised swap transaction under ISDA between two defaultable counterparties, the additional unilat…
ETCNN uses neural networks to price American options accurately.
As is known, an option price is a solution to a certain partial differential equation (PDE) with terminal conditions (payoff functions). There is a close association between the solution of PDE and the solution of a backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). We can either solve the PDE to obtain option prices or…
We provide representations of solutions to terminal value problems of inhomogeneous Black-Scholes equations and studied such general properties as min-max estimates, gradient estimates, monotonicity and convexity of the solutions with respect to the stock price variable, which are important for financial security prici…
Employee stock options (ESOs) are American-style call options that can be terminated early due to employment shock. This paper studies an ESO valuation framework that accounts for job termination risk and jumps in the company stock price. Under general Lévy stock price dynamics, we show that a higher job termination ri…
Paper solves bond option pricing with credit risk using Black-Scholes equations.
Multiscale stochastic volatility models have been developed as an efficient way to capture the principle effects on derivative pricing and portfolio optimization of randomly varying volatility. The recent book Fouque, Papanicolaou, Sircar and Sølna (2011, CUP) analyzes models in which the volatility of the underlying i…
The recently proposed option-critic architecture Bacon et al. provide a stochastic policy gradient approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning. Specifically, they provide a way to estimate the gradient of the expected discounted return with respect to parameters that define a finite number of temporally extended ac…
Generative model prices basket options efficiently.
We propose a new framework to value employee stock options (ESOs) that captures multiple exercises of different quantities over time. We also model the ESO holder's job termination risk and incorporate its impact on the payoffs of both vested and unvested ESOs. Numerical methods based on Fourier transform and finite di…
We present Multitask Soft Option Learning(MSOL), a hierarchical multitask framework based on Planning as Inference. MSOL extends the concept of options, using separate variational posteriors for each task, regularized by a shared prior. This ''soft'' version of options avoids several instabilities during training in a …
We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master policy over options. We apply an actor-critic algorithm on each augmented MDP, yieldi…
Method learns reusable actions from human demonstrations.
Choquet and minimax expectations are equivalent in European option pricing.
This paper examines the valuation of a generalized American-style option known as a Game-style call option in an infinite time horizon setting. The specifications of this contract allow the writer to terminate the call option at any point in time for a fixed penalty amount paid directly to the holder. Valuation of a pe…
A make-your-mind-up option is an American derivative with delivery lags. We show that its put option can be decomposed as a European put and a new type of American-style derivative. The latter is an option for which the investor receives the Greek Theta of the corresponding European option as the running payoff, and de…
The paper addresses hedging Asian options with transaction costs using asymptotic hedging.
Data-driven method for option pricing using historical asset prices.
Building systems that autonomously create temporal abstractions from data is a key challenge in scaling learning and planning in reinforcement learning. One popular approach for addressing this challenge is the options framework (Sutton et al., 1999). However, only recently in (Bacon et al., 2017) was a policy gradient…
We introduce a class of financial contracts involving several parties by extending the notion of a two-person game option (see Kifer (2000)) to a contract in which an arbitrary number of parties is involved and each of them is allowed to make a wide array of decisions at any time, not restricted to simply `exercising t…
This paper works out fair values of stock loan model with automatic termination clause, cap and margin. This stock loan is treated as a generalized perpetual American option with possibly negative interest rate and some constraints. Since it helps a bank to control the risk, the banks charge less service fees compared …
Study shows physical drift affects put-call parity enforcement, not just option payoffs.
The paper extends Strassen's theorem to include biased martingales for American options.
Method interpolates option prices and volatilities without arbitrage.
The paper compares machine learning methods with traditional techniques for pricing and sensitivities of financial products with path-dependent structures.
New method learns temporal abstractions by defining interest functions.
We develop an option pricing model based on a tug-of-war game. This two-player zero-sum stochastic differential game is formulated in the context of a multi-dimensional financial market. The issuer and the holder try to manipulate asset price processes in order to minimize and maximize the expected discounted reward. W…
We present an approach for pricing European call options in presence of proportional transaction costs, when the stock price follows a general exponential Lévy process. The model is a generalization of the celebrated work of Davis, Panas and Zariphopoulou (1993), where the value of the option is defined as the utility …
New method reconstructs Black-Scholes option prices from current profiles.
New algorithms improve learning of long-term actions in reinforcement learning.
Study reveals a hidden cost in derivatives markets through option-implied discount factors.
We introduce two simple models of forward-backward stochastic differential equations with a singular terminal condition and we explain how and why they appear naturally as models for the valuation of CO2 emission allowances. Single phase cap-and-trade schemes lead readily to terminal conditions given by indicator funct…
Path-dependent PDEs model VIX and Realised Variance options.
In an incomplete market, including liquidly-traded European options in an investment portfolio could potentially improve the expected terminal utility for a risk-averse investor. However, unlike the Sharpe ratio, which provides a concise measure of the relative investment attractiveness of different underlying risky as…
A time-dependent double-barrier option is a derivative security that delivers the terminal value at expiry if neither of the continuous time-dependent barriers $b_\pm:[0,T]\to \RR_+$ have been hit during the time interval . Using a probabilistic approach we obtain a decomposition of the barrier opti…
Mitigates DeFi liquidations with reversible call options.
Paper uses deep learning to price and hedge options in incomplete markets.
For an exponential utility maximizing investment strategy in a Black-Scholes Setting, fixed upper and lower constraints are introduced on the terminal wealth. This is equivalent to combining the optimal strategy with options. The resulting distribution is investigated in terms of change of quantiles. The theory is illu…
This paper considers utility indifference valuation of derivatives under model uncertainty and trading constraints, where the utility is formulated as an additive stochastic differential utility of both intertemporal consumption and terminal wealth, and the uncertain prospects are ranked according to a multiple-priors …
Eigenoptions improve credit assignment in reinforcement learning.
This paper develops a CVaR framework for managing tail risks using puts and trend-following strategies.
We study optimal trading in an Almgren-Chriss model with running and terminal inventory costs and general predictive signals about price changes. As a special case, this allows to treat optimal liquidation in "target zone models": asset prices with a reflecting boundary enforced by regulatory interventions. In this cas…
We consider the martingale optimal transport duality for càdlàg processes with given initial and terminal laws. Strong duality and existence of dual optimizers (robust semi-static superhedging strategies) are proved for a class of payoffs that includes American, Asian, Bermudan, and European options with intermediate m…
Fast, reliable, and error-bounded option pricing with neural networks
The growth of the exhange-traded fund (ETF) industry has given rise to the trading of options written on ETFs and their leveraged counterparts {(LETFs)}. We study the relationship between the ETF and LETF implied volatility surfaces when the underlying ETF is modeled by a general class of local-stochastic volatility mo…
We discuss the class of "Quadratic Normal Volatility" models, which have drawn much attention in the financial industry due to their analytic tractability and flexibility. We characterize these models as the ones that can be obtained from stopped Brownian motion by a simple transformation and a change of measure that o…