Market professionals with decades of experience typically argue that a call option is a surrogate for the underlying asset, indicating that they perceive the risk of a call option as similar to the risk of the underlying asset. Experimental evidence also points to the same conclusion. Such...

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the current financial landscape shaped by the crises and new regulations impacts Investment Banking’s business model. We will focus on quantitative implications, i.e. valuation, modeling and pricing issues, as well as qualitative implications,...

This paper provides an assessment of the comparative effectiveness of four econometric methods in estimating the optimal hedge ratio in an emerging equity market, particularly the South African equity and futures markets. The paper bases the effectiveness of hedging on volatility reduction and...

An analogy based call option pricing model is put forward. The model provides a new explanation for the implied volatility skew puzzle. The analogy model is consistent with empirical findings about returns from well studied option strategies such as covered call writing and zero-beta straddles....

Most of the assets on the balance sheet of a typical bank are illiquid. This exposes the bank to liquidity risk, which is one of the key risks for banks. Since the value of assets is determined by their risks, liquidity risk should be included in their valuation. Although in the literature...

This paper is aimed at examining the theoretical determinants and empirical evidence on the use of derivatives in Latin America for risk management. The contingent claims, the development of their market, and their use, is undoubtedly one of the most powerful financial innovations available to...

This paper exploits the fact that implied volatilities calculated from identical call and put options have often been empirically found to differ, although they should be equal in theory. We propose a new bivariate mixture multiplicative error model and show that it is a good fit to Nikkei 225...

We present an Hilbert space formulation for a set of implied volatility models introduced in \cite{BraceGoldys01} in which the authors studied conditions for a family of European call options, varying the maturing time and the strike price $T$ an $K$, to be arbitrage free. The arbitrage free...

An anchoring adjusted option pricing model is put forward in which the risk of the underlying stock is used as a starting point that gets adjusted upwards to estimate call option risk. Anchoring bias implies that such adjustments are insufficient. Black-Scholes formula is a special case with no...

The most popular model for pricing options, both in financial literature as well as in practice has been the Black-Scholes model. In spite of its wide spread use the model appears to be deficient in pricing deep in the money and deep out of the money options using statistical estimates of...