Tag Info

5

Martingales + Markovian Here is the motivation. Conditional expectations are martingales by the tower property of conditional expectations (an easy exercise to show). Suppose $r=0$, by the risk neutral pricing theorem $E^\star\left[h(X_T)\bigg|\mathscr{F}_t,\,X_t=x\right]$ is the price of any derivative security with $X$ as the underlying asset and payoff ...

4

The Feynman-Kac theorem primarily makes sense in a pricing context. If you know that some function solves the Feynman-Kac equation you can represent it's soluation as an Expectation with respect to the process. (confer this document) On the other hand a pricing function solves the FK-PDE. Thus often one would try solving the PDE to get a closed form ...

4

The actual problem one solves for American options is an optimal stopping time problem, so the value of the option is $$V_0 = \max_\tau E_{\tau}\left[e^{-r \tau} (S_\tau-K)^+ \right]$$ where the maximum is taken over all stopping times (exercise strategies $\tau>0$ permissible in the contract). With a PDE operator such as you have, the instantaneous ...

3

The way I think of it is that the PDE describes the flow of a time dependent probability distribution. The stochastic process describes individual realisations (random walks with a drift), but if you ran a large number of them you'd build up a distribution. The PDE says how that distribution changes in time (first term) due to deterministic drift (the ...

1

I am not sure any of the other answers mentioned this but the main reason you should not use an option model to buy/sell the underlying (BS or other) is that the option models are more about market-making in options and hedging using the underlying rather than forecasting the underlying. The layman way to understand this is that: using an option model, you ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible