The growth of the exhange-traded fund (ETF) industry has given rise to the trading of options written on ETFs and their leveraged counterparts {(LETFs)}. We study the relationship between the ETF and LETF implied volatility surfaces when the underlying ETF is modeled by a general class of...

The energy and material processing industries are traditionally characterized by very large-scale physical capital that is custom-built with long lead times and long lifetimes. However, recent technological advancement in low-cost automation has made possible the parallel operation of large...

This paper analyzes the problem of starting and stopping a Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR) process with fixed costs. In addition, we also study a related optimal switching problem that involves an infinite sequence of starts and stops. We establish the conditions under which the starting-stopping and...

This paper studies the risk-adjusted optimal timing to liquidate an option at the prevailing market price. In addition to maximizing the expected discounted return from option sale, we incorporate a path-dependent risk penalty based on shortfall or quadratic variation of the option price up to...

This paper studies the market phenomenon of non-convergence between futures and spot prices in the grains market. We postulate that the positive basis observed at maturity stems from the futures holder's timing options to exercise the shipping certificate delivery item and subsequently liquidate...

This paper studies the timing of trades under mean-reverting price dynamics subject to fixed transaction costs. We solve an optimal double stopping problem to determine the optimal times to enter and subsequently exit the market, when prices are driven by an exponential Ornstein-Uhlenbeck...

Controlling the speed and direction of trades becomes increasingly important to algorithmic trading desks. Brian Bulthuis, Julio Concha, Tim Leung and Brian Ward propose a new optimal execution algorithm with both limit and market orders. An optimal strategy is derived analytically and...