Asymptotic Arbitrage with Small Transaction Costs

We give characterizations of asymptotic arbitrage of the first and second kind and of strong asymptotic arbitrage for a sequence of financial markets with small proportional transaction costs λ n on market n, in terms of contiguity properties of sequences of equivalent probability measures induced by λ n -consistent price systems. These results are analogous to the frictionless case; compare (Kabanov and Kramkov in Finance Stoch. 2:143–172, 1998; Klein and Schachermayer in Theory Probab. Appl. 41:927–934, 1996). Our setting is simple, each market n contains two assets. The proofs use quantitative versions of the Halmos–Savage theorem (see Klein and Schachermayer in Ann. Probab. 24:867–881, 1996) and a monotone convergence result for nonnegative local martingales. Moreover, we study examples of models which admit a strong asymptotic arbitrage without transaction costs, but with transaction costs λ n >0 on market n; there does not exist any form of asymptotic arbitrage. In one case, (λ n ) can even converge to 0, but not too fast.