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...

We study the intra-horizon value at risk (iVaR) in a general jump diffusion setup and propose a new model of asset returns called displaced mixed-exponential model, which can arbitrarily closely approximate finite-activity jump-diffusions and completely monotone Levy processes. We derive...

More than half of S&P 500 CEOs receive options annually, however extant valuation models have not accounted for portfolio considerations. We show the inability of executives to diversify means portfolio effects matter: exercise thresholds and shareholder costs are lower than for stand-alone...

We consider the optimal exercise of a portfolio of American call options in an incomplete market. Options are written on a single underlying asset but may have different characteristics of strikes, maturities and vesting dates.Our motivation is to model the decision faced by an employee who is...

This paper studies the optimal investment problem with random endowment in an inventory-based price impact model with competitive market makers. Our goal is to analyze how price impact affects optimal policies, as well as both pricing rules and demand schedules for contingent claims. For...

We investigate the effect of including variance derivatives as calibration and hedging instruments for pricing and hedging exotic structures. This is studied empirically using market data for SPX and VIX derivatives applied in a stochastic volatility jump diffusion model

The aim of this paper is to determine whether forward-looking option-implied returns forecasts lead to better out-of-sample portfolio performance than conventional time series models. We consider a simple two-asset setting with a risk-free asset and the S&P 500 index the risky asset with monthly...

This essay explores the link between the exponential probability density function and the present value function coupled with moment theory to derive important non probabilistic parameters from the Present value function in which are then used to derive a measure of the volatility of interest...

In this paper we develop a new family of estimators of the covariance matrix that relies solely on forward-looking information. These estimators only use current price information from a cross-section of plain-vanilla options and employ different higher moments of the implied return...

We apply a two-step strategy to forecast the dynamics of the volatility surface implicit in option prices to all American-style options written on the stocks that have entered the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index between 2004 and 2016. We explore whether the implied volatilities extracted...