Volatility products have become popular in the past 15 years as a hedge against market uncertainty. In particular, there is growing interest in options on the VIX volatility index. A number of recent empirical studies have examine whether there is significantly greater risk premium in VIX...

We study the problem of optimally hedging exotic derivatives positions using a combination of dynamic trading strategies in underlying stocks and static positions in vanilla options when the performance is quantified by a convex risk measure. We establish conditions for the existence of an...

This paper studies the effect of introducing stochastic volatility in the first-passage structural approach to default risk. The impact of volatility time scales on the yield spread curve is analyzed. In particular it is shown that the presence of a short time scale in the volatility raises the...

The skew effect in market implied volatility can be reproduced by option pricing theory based on stochastic volatility models for the price of the underlying asset. Here we study the performance of the calibration of the S&P 500 implied volatility surface using the asymptotic pricing theory...

We consider an investor who maximizes expected exponential utility of terminal wealth, combining a static position in derivative securities with a traditional dynamic trading strategy in stocks. Our main result, obtained by studying the strict concavity of the utility-indifference price as a...

Selected hedge funds employ trend-following strategies in an attempt to achieve superior risk-adjusted returns. We employ a lookback straddle approach for evaluating the return characteristics of a trend-following strategy. The strategies can improve investor performance in the context of a...

The pricing of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other basket credit derivatives is contingent upon (i) a realistic modelling of the firms' default times and the correlation between them, and (ii) efficient computational methods for computing the portfolio loss distribution from the...

We study the impact of risk-aversion on the valuation of credit derivatives. Using the technology of utility-indifference pricing in intensity-based models of default risk, we analyse resulting yield spreads in multi-name credit derivatives, particularly CDOs. We study first the idealized...

Energy companies with commitments to meet customers' daily electricity demands face the problem of hedging load and price risk. We propose a joint model for load and price dynamics, which is motivated by the goal of facilitating optimal hedging decisions, while also intuitively capturing the key...