The optimal portfolio of a utility-maximizing investor trading in the S&P 500 index and cash, subject to proportional transaction costs, becomes stochastically dominated when overlaid with a zero-net-cost portfolio of S&P 500 options bought at their ask and written at their bid price in most...

Widespread violations of stochastic dominance by one-month S&P 500 index call options over 1986-2006 imply that a trader can improve expected utility by engaging in a zero-net-cost trade net of transaction costs and bid-ask spread. Although pre-crash option prices conform to the...

The central premise of the Black and Scholes [Black, F., Scholes, M. (1973). The pricing of options and corporate liabilities. Journal of Political Economy 81, 637–659] and Merton [Merton, R. (1973). Theory of rational option pricing. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 4,...