By employing the modified net buying pressure as a measure of informed option trading, this study tested whether option trading around quarterly earnings announcements is either directionally motivated and/or volatility motivated. We found evidence that is consistent with the idea that option...

Arbitrage and liquidity are interrelated. Liquidity facilitates arbitrageurs’ trading on deviations from the law of one price. However, whether arbitrage opportunity leads to an increase or decrease in liquidity depends on the cause of the deviation. A demand shock leads to greater liquidity,...

The ground-breaking Black-Scholes-Merton model has brought about a generation of derivative pricing models that have been successfully applied in the financial industry. It has been a long standing puzzle that the structural models of credit risk, as an application of the same modeling paradigm,...

It is argued that the growth in the breadth of option strikes traded after the financial crisis of 2008 poses difficulties for the use of Fourier inversion methodologies in volatility surface calibration. Continuous time Markov chain approximations are proposed as an alternative. They are shown...

This paper demonstrates that it is possible to improve significantly on the estimated call prices obtained with the regression and simulation-based least-squares Monte Carlo method by using put-call symmetry. The results show that, for a large sample of options with characteristics of relevance...

By reinterpreting the calibration of structural models, a reassessment of the importance of the input variables is undertaken. The analysis shows that volatility is the key parameter to any calibration exercise, by several orders of magnitude. To maximize the sensitivity to volatility, a simple...

The valuation of options and many other derivative instruments requires an estimation of exante or forward looking volatility. This paper adopts a Bayesian approach to estimate stock price volatility. We find evidence that overall Bayesian volatility estimates more closely approximate the...

This paper considers the multiperiod hedging decision in a framework of mean-reverting spot prices and unbiased futures markets. The task is to determine the optimal hedging path, i.e., the sequence of positions in futures contracts with the objective of minimizing the variance of an uncertain...

An argument for adjusting Black Scholes implied call deltas downwards for a gamma exposure in a left skewed market is presented. It is shown that when the objective for the hedge is the conservation of capital ignoring the gamma for the delta position is expensive. The gamma adjustment factor in...

In this paper, we modify Duan’s (1995) local risk-neutral valuation relationship (mLRNVR) for the GARCH option-pricing models. In our mLRNVR, the conditional variances under two measures are designed to be different and the variance process is more persistent in the risk-neutral measure than...