Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund’s alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

In a complete financial market every contingent claim can be hedged perfectly. In an incomplete market it is possible to stay on the safe side by superhedging. But such strategies may require a large amount of initial capital. Here we study the question what an investor can do who is unwilling...

An investor faced with a contingent claim may eliminate risk by (super-)hedging in a financial market. As this is often quite expensive, we study partial hedges, which require less capital and reduce the risk. In a previous paper we determined quantile hedges which succeed with maximal...

Transaction-cost models in continuous-time markets are considered. Given that investors decide to buy or sell at certain time instants, we study the existence of trading strategies that reach a certain final wealth level in continuous-time markets, under the assumption that transaction costs,...

Taking a portfolio perspective on option pricing and hedging, we show that within the standard Black-Scholes-Merton framework large portfolios of options can be hedged without risk in discrete time. The nature of the hedge portfolio in the limit of large portfolio size is substantially different...

Stocks are exposed to the risk of sudden downward jumps. Additionally, a crash in one stock (or index) can increase the risk of crashes in other stocks (or indices). Our paper explicitly takes this contagion risk into account and studies its impact on the portfolio decision of a CRRA investor...

The volatilities of Treasury and time deposit markets comove with equity volatility quite heterogeneously over time, with correlations ranging from negative to positive, and marked by periods of rapid movement. What is the price of Treasury volatility or, say, that of the Eurodollar LIBOR? How...

Eurodollar deposit volatility comoves with equity volatility quite heterogeneously over time, with correlations ranging from negative to positive, and marked by periods of rapid movement. What is the price of time deposit volatility? How can we express this price in a model-free format? Despite...

Credit volatility correlates quite modestly with equity volatility. Currently, only backward-looking indexes for credit volatility exist. We derive model-free indexes of expected CDS index spread volatility that rely on CDS index option prices, which re ect the fair value of dedicated credit...

While CBOE's VIX index is widely acknowledged as a broad-based investor “fear gauge” for its strong inverse relationship with major equity indexes, one cannot necessarily expect it to translate to the level of future turbulence or investor risk aversion in fixed-income markets. Indeed,...