Call option | EPFL Graph Search

In finance, a call option, often simply labeled a "call", is a contract between the buyer and the seller of the call option to exchange a security at a set price. The buyer of the call option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial instrument (the underlying) from the seller of the option at or before a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (the strike price). This effectively gives the owner a long position in the given asset. The seller (or "writer") is obliged to sell the commodity or financial instrument to the buyer if the buyer so decides. This effectively gives the seller a short position in the given asset. The buyer pays a fee (called a premium) for this right. The term "call" comes from the fact that the owner has the right to "call the stock away" from the seller. Price of options Option values vary with the value of the underlying instrument over time. The price of the call contrac

Three Essays on Asset Pricing

Emmanuel Leclercq

In the first chapter,which is a joint work with Mathieu Cambou and Philippe H.A. Charmoy, we study the distribution of the hedging errors of a European call option for the delta and variance-minimizing strategies. Considering the setting proposed by Heston (1993), we assess the error distribution by computing its moments under the real-world probability measure. It turns out that one is better off implementing either a delta hedging or a variance-minimizing strategy, depending on the strike and maturity of the option under consideration. In the second paper, which is a joint work with Damir Filipovic and Loriano Mancini, we develop a practicable continuous-time dynamic arbitrage-free model for the pricing of European contingent claims. Using the framework introduced by Carmona and Nadtochiy (2011, 2012), the stock price is modeled as a semi-martingale process and, at each time t , the marginal distribution of the European option prices is coded by an auxiliary process that starts at t and follows an exponential additive process. The jump intensity that characterizes these auxiliary processes is then set in motion by means of stochastic dynamics of Itô's type. The model is a modification of the one proposed by Carmona and Nadtochiy, as only finitely many jump sizes are assumed. This crucial assumption implies that the jump intensities are taken values in only a finitedimensional space. In this setup, explicit necessary and sufficient consistency conditions that guarantee the absence of arbitrage are provided. A practicable dynamic model verifying them is proposed and estimated, using options on the S&P 500. Finally, the hedging of variance swap contracts is considered. It is shown that under certain conditions, a variance-minimizing hedging portfolio gives lower hedging errors on average, compared to a model-free hedging strategy. In the third and last chapter, which is a joint work with Rémy Praz, we concentrate on the commodity markets and try to understand the impact of financiers on the hedging decisions. We look at the changes in the spot price, variance, production and hedging choices of both producers and financiers, when the mass of financiers in the economy increases. We develop an equilibrium model of commodity spot and futures markets in which commodity production, consumption, and speculation are endogenously determined. Financiers facilitate hedging by the commodity suppliers. The entry of new financiers thus increases the supply of the commodity and decreases the expected spot prices, to the benefits of the end-users. However, this entry may be detrimental to the producers, as they do not internalize the price reduction due to greater aggregate supply. In the presence of asymmetric information, speculation on the futures market serves as a learning device. The futures price and open interest reveal different pieces of private information regarding the supply and demand side of the spot market, respectively. When the accuracy of private information is low, the entry of new financiers makes both production and spot prices more volatile. The entry of new financiers typically increases the correlation between financial and commodity markets.

EPFL2014

Covariance Estimation for Random Surfaces beyond Separability

Tomas Masák

This thesis focuses on non-parametric covariance estimation for random surfaces, i.e.~functional data on a two-dimensional domain. Non-parametric covariance estimation lies at the heart of functional data analysis, andconsiderations of statistical and computational efficiency often compel the use of separability of the covariance, when working with random surfaces. We seek to provide efficient alternatives to this ambivalent assumption.In Chapter 2, we study a setting where the covariance structure may fail to be separable locally -- either due to noise contamination or due to the presence of a non-separable short-range dependent signal component. That is, the covariance is an additive perturbation of a separable component by a non-separable but banded component. We introduce non-parametric estimators hinging on shifted partial tracing -- a novel concept enjoying strong denoising properties. We illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology on a data set of mortality surfaces.In Chapter 3, we propose a distinctive decomposition of the covariance, which allows us to understand separability as an unconventional form of low-rankness. From this perspective, a separable covariance has rank one. Allowing for a higher rank suggests a structured class in which any covariance can be approximated up to an arbitrary precision. The key notion of the partial inner product allows us to generalize the power iteration method to general Hilbert spaces and estimate the aforementioned decomposition from data. Truncation and retention of the leading terms automatically induces a non-parametric estimator of the covariance, whose parsimony is dictated by the truncation level. Advantages of this approach, allowing for estimation beyond separability, are demonstrated on the task of classification of EEG signals.While Chapters 2 and 3 propose several generalizations of separability in the densely sampled regime, Chapter 4 deals with the sparse regime, where the latent surfaces are observed only at few irregular locations. Here, a separable covariance estimator based on local linear smoothers is proposed, which is the first non-parametric utilization of separability in the sparse regime. The assumption of separability reduces the intrinsically four-dimensional smoothing problem into several two-dimensional smoothers and allows the proposed estimator to retain the classical minimax-optimal convergence rate for two-dimensional smoothers. The proposed methodology is used for a qualitative analysis of implied volatility surfaces corresponding to call options, and for prediction of the latent surfaces based on information from the entire data set, allowing for uncertainty quantification. Our quantitative results show that the proposed methodology outperforms the common approach of pre-smoothing every implied volatility surface separately.Throughout the thesis, we put emphasis on computational aspects, since those are the main reason behind the immense popularity of separability. We show that the covariance structures of Chapters 2 and 3 come with no (asymptotic) computational overhead relative to assuming separability. In fact, the proposed covariance structures can be estimated and manipulated with the same asymptotic costs as the separable model. In particular, we develop numerical algorithms that can be used for efficient inversion, as required e.g.~for prediction. All the methods are implemented in R and available on~GitHub.

EPFL2022

Three Essays on Asset Pricing

Emmanuel Leclercq

EPFL2014

Covariance Estimation for Random Surfaces beyond Separability

Tomas Masák

EPFL2022