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                                                     Seminar

             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Title

:

Functional Ito calculus and applications to path-dependent options

 

 

 

Speaker

:

Prof. Rama Cont

 

 

Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research

 

 

Columbia University

 

 

 

Date

:

Dec. 22nd, 2010 (Wednesday)

 

 

 

Time

:

5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

 

 

 

Venue

:

Room 513

 

 

William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

 

 

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

 

 

CUHK

 

 

 

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Abstract:
 

We develop an extension of the Ito calculus for to path-dependent functionals of a semimartingale, using a notion of non-anticipative functional derivative proposed by B. Dupire. The key ingredient is a functional Ito formula, which is used to derive an explicit martingale representation formula for square integrable martingales. Regular functionals of a semimartingale S which have the local martingale property are characterized as solutions of a functional equation, for which a uniqueness result is given.

 

This result is used to derive:

 

(a) a universal pricing equation for path-dependent derivatives, which is shown to be a functional equation whose coefficients involve the local characteristics of the stochastic process S describing the price of the underlying asset.

 

(b) a general formula for the hedging strategy of a path-dependent contingent claim and

 

(c) a numerical method for computing this hedging strategy.

 

By contrast with methods based on Malliavin calculus, this representation is based on non-anticipative quantities which may be computed pathwise and leads to simple simulation-based estimators for computing hedging strategies for path-dependent options.


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Biography:
 

Prof. Rama Cont is currently Directeur de Recherche CNRS, Laboratoire de Probabilités et Modeles Aléatoires, Paris, France, and associate professor and director of Center for Financial Engineering at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York. His research interests include computational finance, stochastic modeling of financial markets, Lévy processes and applications, 
interest rate and credit risk modeling, modeling of social networks, and  ill posed inverse problems.

 

Prof. Rama Cont is one of the leading scholars in quantitative finance and has published more than 40 papers in the field. He serves in the editorial boards of various scientific journals such as SIAM Journal of Financial Mathematics, Operations Research, Quantitative Finance and International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance. He is also editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance published by Johns

Wiley, which is an essential reference work providing comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of all aspects of quantitative modeling in finance.


************************* ALL ARE WELCOME ************************

 

 

 

Host

:

Prof. Nan Chen

Tel

:

(852)2609-8237

Email

:

nchen@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

 

 

Enquiries

:

Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou

 

:

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

 

 

CUHK

Website

:

http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seem5201

Email

:

seem5201@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

 

 

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