Thursday, September 3, 2015

Discrete time option gamma hedging


1) An option V under the Black-Scholes model is perfectly hedged when it is delta hedged continuously with the underlying S. When the hedging time is discrete, the delta Δ needs to take into account the gamma Γ. One way to do this is to Taylor expand the hedge portfolio V(t,S)ΔS over a finite time interval δ and minimize the variance var[δ(V(t,S)ΔS)]. We can obtain, Δ=VS+cSVSSδt+O((δt)2)

for some constant c.


For the discrete time hedging, is it better to introduce another option H with weight w on S to form the portfolio Π:=VwHΔS to hedge V, as H has its gamma to hedge that of V? I Taylor-expand the Π over δt and have obtained a result with a complicated expression for (Δ,w) which I am not entirely sure of. Are there any references on this topic of "gamma hedging"?





2) Thanks to Quantuple's pointer to Chapter 1 of Lorenzo Bergomi's book Stochastic Volatility Modeling, it is clear now that the gamma comes into the hedge for a purpose that is very distinct from what I described above. It is first and foremost a hedge against the stochasticity of the difference between the realized variance and the implied variance, rather then coming into the delta hedging as a first-order correction for the finiteness of the hedging time interval. Here is the follow-up question.


Suppose the option V has 2 underlyings S1 and S2 which are correlated with each other with correlation ρ and we have two hedging options H1 with only underlying S1 and H2 with only underlying S2. The volatility of S1 is σ1 and that of S2 is σ1. I would like to determine the impact of ρ on hedging coefficients w1 of H1 and w2 of H2. Is the following approach correct?


We delta hedge all the options. We assume the volatilities are stochastic. Let :=E[]. p&l=12S212(Vw1H1)S21(σ21σ21,imp)+12S212(Vw2H2)S22(σ22σ22,imp)+S1S22VS1S2(ρσ1σ2ρσ1σ2)+functional of (Vw1H1w2H2) the volatilities, realized and implied,

where "imp" on the subscript denotes that the variable is implied from the option price. Ignore the last term for now. Denote α1:=S212S21(Vw1H1) and similarly for α2,v1,2:=ρσ1σ2ρσ1σ2,v1:=σ21σ21,imp and similarly for v2. It is reasonable to assume v1=v2=v12=0. We have var[p&l]=14α21v21+α1α1,2v1v1,2+14α22v22+α2α1,2v2v1,2+α21,2v21,2.
Minimizing the variance above can be viewed geometrically as the vector α1,2v1,2 projecting on the hyperplane spanned by the vectors {12α1v1,12α2v2}. So α1,min=2v1v1,2v21α1,2 and α2,min=2v2v1,2v22α1,2 minimizes var[p&l]. w1,min=Γ1+2v1v1,2v21S2S1Γ1,2ΓH1
and exchanging 1 and 2 on the subscript gives the expression for w2,min.




No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...