We define the class of local Levy processes. These are Levy 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...

There are several (mathematical) reasons why Dupire's formula fails in the non-diffusion setting. And yet, in practice, ad-hoc preconditioning of the option data works reasonably well. In this note, we attempt to explain why. In particular, we propose a regularization procedure of the option...

In this paper, we show that the calibration to an implied volatility surface and the pricing of contingent claims can be as simple in a jump-diffusion framework as in a diffusion framework. Indeed, after defining the jump densities as those of diffusions sampled at independent and exponentially...

Vanilla (standard European) options are actively traded on many underlying asset classes, such as equities, commodities and foreign exchange (FX). The market quotes for these options are typically used by exotic options traders to calibrate the parameters of the (risk-neutral) stochastic process...

A time homogeneous, purely discontinuous, parsimonous Markov martingale model is proposed for the risk neutral dynamics of equity forward prices. Transition probabilities are in the variance gamma class with spot dependent parameters. Markov chain approximations give access to option prices. The...

A Markov chain with an expanding non-uniform grid matching risk-neutral marginal distributions is constructed. Conditional distributions of the chain are in the variance gamma class with pre-specified skewness and excess kurtosis. Time change and space scale volatilities are calibrated from...

When firms access unbounded liability exposures and are granted limited liability, then an all equity firm holds a call option, whereby it receives a free option to put losses back to the taxpayers. We call this option the taxpayer put, where the strike is the negative of the level of reserve...

With an interest in keeping the cost of carry at acceptable levels for the expression of a positive or negative view on an equity asset over the longer term, a variation to equity default swaps is introduced that fixes the barrier at a given quantile. The barrier level for the stock price then...