I'm trying understand something basic about Black-Scholes pricing of binary options. In my example above, the current price is over the strike price. The volatility is extreme but I'm still having trouble understanding why the price of the binary option (which I'm interpreting as the probability of expiring in the money) would be below 50 (50% odds). Assuming a random walk from the current price, isn't it more likely that it would expire above the strike?
Black-Scholes gives an implied price of ~ 0.390. Which I interpret as a 39% chance of expirying in the money? Why wouldn't' it be more then 50%?
S = 110 #current_price
K = 100 #ATM strike
v = 1.20 #annualized volatility
r = 0.00 #interest rate
T = 0.44 #days remaining (annualized)
d2 = (log(S/K) + (r - 0.5 * v**2) * T) / (v*sqrt(T))
print exp(-r * T) * norm.cdf(d2)
0.390...
v*sqrt(T)
$\endgroup$ – Phil-ZXX Jul 27 '18 at 21:02