Traditionally volatility is viewed as a measure of variability, or risk, of an underlying asset. However recently investors began to look at volatility from a different angle. It happened due to emergence of a market for new derivative instruments - variance swaps. In this paper first we...

Realized variance option and options on quadratic variation normalized to unit expectation are analyzed for the property of monotonicity in maturity for call options at a fixed strike. When this condition holds the risk neutral densities are said to be increasing in the convex order. For Lévy...

Target volatility options (TVO) are a new class of derivatives whose payoff depends on some measure of volatility. These options allow investors to take a joint exposure to the evolution of the underlying asset, as well as to its realized volatility. For instance, a target volatility call can be...

We investigate PDEs of the form u_t = 1/2 σ^2 (t, x)u_{xx} − g(x)u which are associated with the calculation of expectations for a large class of local volatility models. We find nontrivial symmetry groups that can be used to obtain standard integral transforms of fundamental solutions of the...

In this paper, we develop a novel model to forecast the volatility of S&P 500 futures returns by considering measures of limits to arbitrage. When arbitrageurs face constraints on their trading strategies, option prices can become disconnected from fundamentals, resulting in a distortion that...