Energy commodity prices have been rising at an unprecedented pace over the last five years. As oil supplies tighten and prices frequently break new highs, major oil companies have recently unveiled a flurry of multi-billion dollar deals for new projects whose target is not oil but natural gas....

During the last decade, hedge funds have become an increasingly attractive class of assets, viewed as investments offering greater returns while risk is reduced through extensive diversification. Hedge funds have indeed grown exponentially in size, number and management style. The goal of this...

This paper analyzes the special features of electricity spot prices derived from the physics of this commodity and from the economics of supply and demand in a market pool. Besides mean-reversion, a property they share with other commodities, power prices exhibit the unique feature of spikes in...

The last five years have witnessed a great momentum in the research into measures of financial risk. After many years of ad-hoc and non-consistent measures, now the problem is finally well formulated and some useful and very user-friendly solutions have been proposed. These new measures of risk...

We define the class of local Lévy processes. These are Lévy processes time changed by an inhomogeneous local speed function. The local speed function is a deterministic function of time and the level of the process itself. We show how to reverse engineer the local speed function from traded...

The risk-neutral process is modeled by a four parameter self-similar process of independent increments with a self-decomposable law for its unit time distribution. Six different processes in this general class are theoretically formulated and empirically investigated. We show that all six models...

The goal of the paper is to analyse the various issues attached to the valuation of weather derivatives. We focus our study on temperature-related contracts since they are the most widely traded at this point and try to address the following questions: (i) should the quantity underlying the...

Three processes reflecting persistence of volatility are initially formulated by evaluating three Lévy processes at a time change given by the integral of a mean-reverting square root process. The model for the mean-reverting time change is then generalized to include non-Gaussian models that...

The last few years have been a watershed for the commodities, cash and derivatives industry. New regulations and products have led to an explosion in the commodities markets, creating a new asset class for investors that includes hedge funds as well as University endowments, and has resulted in...

The goal of the paper is to review the last 35 years of continuous-time finance by focusing on two major advances: (i) The powerful elegance of the martingale representation for primitive assets and attainable contingent claims in more and more general settings, thanks to the probabilistic tool...