Volatility swaps and volatility options are financial products written on discretely sampled realized variance. Actively traded in over-the-counter markets, these products are often priced by continuously sampled approximations to simplify the computations. This paper presents an analytical...

In this paper, we price covariance and correlation swaps for financial markets with Markov-modulated volatilities. As an example, we consider stochastic volatility driven by a two-state continuous Markov chain. In this case, numerical examples are presented for VIX and VXN volatility indices...

We investigate the effect of discrete sampling and asset price jumps on fair variance and volatility swap strikes. Fair discrete volatility strikes and fair discrete variance strikes are derived in different models of the underlying evolution of the asset price: the Black-Scholes model, the...

A model is developed for pricing volatility derivatives, such as variance swaps and volatility swaps under a continuous-time Markov-modulated version of the stochastic volatility (SV) model developed by Heston. In particular, it is supposed that the parameters of this version of Heston's SV...

We show that if the discounted Stock price process is a continuous martingale, then there is a simple relationship linking the variance of the terminal Stock price and the variance of its arithmetic average. We use this to establish a model-independent upper bound for the price of a continuously...

It is shown that, in a semimartingale financial market model, there is equivalence between absence of arbitrage of the first kind (a weak viability condition) and the existence of a strictly positive process that acts as a local martingale deflator on nonnegative wealth processes. Copyright...

We review the main results in the theory of quadratic hedging in a general incomplete model of continuous trading with semimartingale price process. The objective is to hedge contingent claims by using portfolio strategies. We describe two types of criteria: the so-called (local)...