Instantaneous risk is described by the arrival rate of jumps in log price relatives. Aggregate arrivals are infinite. There is then no concept of a mean return compensating risk exposure. The only risk-free instantaneous return is zero. All portfolios are subject to risk and there are only bad...

Allowing for correlated squared returns across two consecutive periods, portfolio theory for two periods is developed. This correlation makes it necessary to work with non-Gaussian models. The two period conic portfolio problem is formulated and implemented. This development leads to a mean ask...

Portfolios are designed to maximize a conservative market value or bid price for the portfolio. Theoretically this bid price is modeled as reflecting a convex cone of acceptable risks supporting an arbitrage free equilibrium of a two price economy. When risk acceptability is completely defined...

Two price economy principles motivate measuring risk by the cost of acquiring the opposite of the centered or pure risk position at its upper price. Asymmetry in returns leads to differences in risk charges for short and long positions. Short risk charges dominate long ones when the upper tail...

A portfolio diversification index is defined as the ratio of an equivalent number of independent assets to the number of assets. The equivalence is based on either attaining the same diversification benefit or spread reduction. The diversification benefit is the difference in value of a value...

The problem studied is the pricing of options on the CBOE Skew index. The option pricing theory developed seeks to hedge the risk using positions in the market for options on a related asset and the option is then priced at the cost of this hedge. The theory is applied to pricing VIX options...

The risk conscious investor is defined as the maximizer of a conservative valuation or dynamically a nonlinear expectation. Both the static and dynamic problems are addressed using distortions of tail probabilities or distortions of tail measures. The multivariate static problem is solved in the...

Options paying the product of put and/or call option payouts at different strikes on two underlying assets are observed to synthesize joint densities and replicate differentiable functions of two underlying asset prices. The pricing of such options is undertaken from three perspectives. The...

We contrast two different asset pricing models, where the pricing kernel either (i) increases in the volatility dimension, reflecting investors' aversion to volatility, or (ii) could be non-monotonic in volatility, reflecting heterogeneity in investors' beliefs. The two models yield opposite...

When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...