In a financial market with a continuous price process and proportional transaction costs we investigate the problem of utility maximization of terminal wealth. We give sufficient conditions for the existence of a shadow price process, i.e.~a least favorable frictionless market leading to the...

For portfolio choice problems with proportional transaction costs, we discuss whether or not there exists a "shadow price", i.e., a least favorable frictionless market extension leading to the same optimal strategy and utility. By means of an explicit counter-example, we show that shadow prices...

For portfolio optimisation under proportional transaction costs, we provide a duality theory for general cadlag price processes. In this setting, we prove the existence of a dual optimiser as well as a shadow price process in a generalised sense. This shadow price is defined via a "sandwiched"...

While absence of arbitrage in frictionless financial markets requires price processes to be semimartingales, non-semimartingales can be used to model prices in an arbitrage-free way, if proportional transaction costs are taken into account. In this paper, we show, for a class of price processes...

It is well known that mean-variance portfolio selection is a time-inconsistent optimal control problem in the sense that it does not satisfy Bellman's optimality principle and therefore the usual dynamic programming approach fails. We develop a time- consistent formulation of this problem, which...

The Markowitz problem consists of finding in a financial market a self-financing trading strategy whose final wealth has maximal mean and minimal variance. We study this in continuous time in a general semimartingale model and under cone constraints: Trading strategies must take values in a...

We present a unified approach to Doob's $L^p$ maximal inequalities for $1\leq p\infty$. The novelty of our method is that these martingale inequalities are obtained as consequences of elementary deterministic counterparts. The latter have a natural interpretation in terms of robust hedging....

A well known result in stochastic analysis reads as follows: for an $\mathbb{R}$-valued super-martingale $X = (X_t)_{0\leq t \leq T}$ such that the terminal value $X_T$ is non-negative, we have that the entire process $X$ is non-negative. An analogous result holds true in the no arbitrage theory...

We consider a financial market with one riskless and one risky asset. The super-replication theorem states that there is no duality gap in the problem of super-replicating a contingent claim under transaction costs and the associated dual problem. We give two versions of this theorem. The first...

We compare the option pricing formulas of Louis Bachelier and Black-Merton-Scholes and observe -- theoretically as well as for Bachelier's original data -- that the prices coincide very well. We illustrate Louis Bachelier's efforts to obtain applicable formulas for option pricing in pre-computer...