We review the nature of some well-known phenomena such as volatility smiles, convexity adjustments and parallel derivative markets. We propose that the market is incomplete and postulate the existence of intrinsic risks in every contingent claim as a basis for understanding these phenomena. In a...

This paper derives explicit formulas for both the small and large time limits of the implied volatility in the minimal market model. It is shown that interest rates do impact on the implied volatility in the long run even though they are negligible in the short time limit.

A financial market model where agents trade using realistic combinations of buy-and-hold strategies is considered. Minimal assumptions are made on the discounted asset-price process - in particular, the semimartingale property is not assumed. Via a natural market viability assumption, namely,...

This paper demonstrates the usefulness and importance of the concept of honest times to financial modeling. It studies a financial market with asset prices that follow jump-diffusions with negative jumps. The central building block of the market model is its growth optimal portfolio (GOP), which...

The Dybvig-Ingersoll-Ross (DIR) theorem states that, in arbitrage-free term structure models, long-term yields and forward rates can never fall. We present a refined version of the DIR theorem, where we identify the reciprocal of the maturity date as the maximal order that long-term rates at...

In a financial market model, we consider variations of the problem of minimizing the expected time to upcross a certain wealth level. For exponential Levy markets, we show the asymptotic optimality of the growth-optimal portfolio for the above problem and obtain tight bounds for the value...

A financial market model with general semimartingale asset-price processes and where agents can only trade using no-short-sales strategies is considered. We show that wealth processes using continuous trading can be approximated very closely by wealth processes using simple combinations of...

We consider the portfolio choice problem for a long-run investor in a general continuous semimartingale model. We suggest to use path-wise growth optimality as the decision criterion and encode preferences through restrictions on the class of admissible wealth processes. Specifically, the...

We discuss suitable classes of diffusion processes, for which functionals relevant to finance can be computed via Monte Carlo methods. In particular, we construct exact simulation schemes for processes from this class. However, should the finance problem under consideration require e.g....

We study the pricing and hedging of derivatives in incomplete financial markets by considering the local risk-minimization method in the context of the benchmark approach, which will be called benchmarked local risk-minimization. We show that the proposed benchmarked local risk-minimization...