Sunday, June 12, 2016

European Call Option Delta Upper Bound


For a pure equity process (with interest rate, dividend, etc., being zero) not necessarily the geometric Brownian motion, is the delta of a European call option always no higher than 1? I am NOT asking for the Black-Scholes delta, but a model free general property of the European call delta. We can consider this question with and without the martingale property that the expected underlying price should be the current price.


I have also formulated this question a more formal fashion here as a calculus of variation or linear programming problem.



Answer



It is false. Here is an example. Let dSt=rStdt+f(S0)StdWt,

dBt=rdt.
The price is then the Black-Scholes price with volatility f(S0). The delta is the BS delta plus f(S0)×BS Vega.
Picking f appropriately, we can make the Delta as big as we like.


Note that the example is highly artificial in that volatility is a function of S0 rather than St.


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