Recent equity volatility is near all-time lows. Option prices are also low. Many analysts suggest this represents a good opportunity to purchase put options for portfolio insurance.It is well-known that portfolio insurance is expensive on average, but what about in calm markets? History suggests...

Equity index covered calls have historically provided attractive risk-adjusted returns largely because they collect equity and volatility risk premia from their long equity and short volatility exposures. However, they also embed exposure to an uncompensated risk, a naïve equity market reversal...

A covered call is a long position in a security and a short position in a call option on that security. Equity index covered calls are an attractive strategy to many investors because they have realized returns not much lower than those of the equity market but with much lower volatility....

Abstract. This paper describes how an efficient and exact Monte-Carlo simulation of the Hull-White model could be performed. For that purpose the joint conditional distribution of the short interest rate and the discount factor is derived. The proposed approach can be straightforward extended to...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

We propose a novel method for the analytical approximation in local volatility models with Lévy jumps. The main result is an expansion of the characteristic function in a local Lévy model, which is worked out in the Fourier space by considering the adjoint formulation of the pricing problem....

We develop approximate formulae expressed in terms of elementary functions for the density, the price and the Greeks of path dependent options of Asian style, in a general local volatility model. An algorithm for computing higher order approximations is provided. The proof is based on a heat...

We present a simplified approach to the analytical approximation of the transition density related to a general local volatility model. The methodology is sufficiently flexible to be extended to time-dependent coefficients, multi-dimensional stochastic volatility models, degenerate parabolic...

Ross recovery specifies conditions under which it is possible to recover the real-world probability measure as well as the pricing kernel from a family of pricing operators. In this paper, we study Ross recovery theoretically within a semigroup framework using Perron-Frobenius operator theory....

We use a new method to estimate ex ante higher order moments of stock market returns from option prices. Even and odd number higher order moments are strongly negatively correlated, creating periods where the return distribution is riskier because it is more left-skewed and fat tailed. The...