Friday, October 4, 2019

How to price an option allowing to change a call into a put?


A recruiter asked me this question:


Suppose you have the following contract:



  • a call option with maturity $T$ = 2 years

  • the possibility to change this call into a put at $t$ = 1 year


What is the price of such contract ?


I begin with $E[\left((-1)^{\tau}(S_{T}-K)\right)^{+}e^{-rT}]$ with $\tau$ a random variable that equals $+1$ if we change the call into a put and $-1$ if we don't change it, but i'm stuck with this...




Answer



Let $t=1$ and $T=2$. The value at time $t$ is given by \begin{align*} &\ e^{-r(T-t)}\max\left(E\left((S_T-K)^+\mid \mathcal{F}_{t}\right), \, E\left((K-S_T)^+\mid \mathcal{F}_{t}\right)\right) \\ =&\ e^{-r(T-t)}E\left((K-S_T)^+\mid \mathcal{F}_{t}\right) +e^{-r(T-t)}\max\left(E\left((S_T-K)\mid \mathcal{F}_{t}\right), \, 0\right)\\ =&\ e^{-r(T-t)}E\left((K-S_T)^+\mid \mathcal{F}_{t}\right) +\max\left(S_{t}-Ke^{-r(T-t)}, \, 0\right). \end{align*} That is, the value is for a portfolio with a put at $T$ and a call at $t$, and can be computed using formulas of Black-Scholes type.


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...