The sovereign debt crisis challenged investors in European government bonds to deal with volatile interest rate spreads. For managing sovereign risk, “Eurex” introduced futures contracts on Italian government bonds reflecting risks of lower rated countries. We analyze hedging strategies for bond portfolios with futures on German and Italian government bonds before and during the sovereign debt ...

This paper looks at the development of dynamic hedging strategies for typical pension plan liabilities using longevity-linked hedging instruments. Progress in this area has been hindered by the lack of closed-form formulas for the valuation of mortalitylinked liabilities and assets, and the consequent requirement for simulations within simulations. We propose use of the probit function along wi...

In bet hedging, organisms sacrifice short-term success to reduce the long-term variance in success. Delayed germination is the classic example of bet hedging, in which a fraction of seeds remain dormant as a hedge against the risk of complete reproductive failure. Here, we investigate the adaptive nature of delayed germination as a bet hedging strategy using long-term demographic data on Sonora...

One of the most successful approaches to option hedging with transaction costs is the utility based approach, pioneered by Hodges and Neuberger (1989). Judging against the best possible tradeoff between the risk and the costs of a hedging strategy, this approach seems to achieve excellent empirical performance. However, this approach has one major drawback that prevents the broad application of...

This paper presents hedging strategies for European and exotic options in a Lévy market. By applying Taylor's theorem, dynamic hedging portfolios are constructed under different market assumptions, such as the existence of power jump assets or moment swaps. In the case of European options or baskets of European options, static hedging is implemented. It is shown that perfect hedging can be achi...

Using a result in Angelini and Herzel (2009a), we measure, in terms of variance, the cost of hedging a contingent claim when the hedging portfolio is re-balanced at a discrete set of dates. We analyze the dependence of the variance of the hedging error on the skewness and kurtosis as modeled by a Normal Inverse Gaussian model. We consider two types of strategies, the standard Black-Scholes Delt...

We present a method of optimal hedging and pricing of equity-linked life insurance products in an incomplete discrete-time financial market. A pure endowment life insurance contract with guarantee is used as an example. The financial market incompleteness is caused by the assumption that the underlying risky asset price ratios are distributed in a compact interval, generalizing the assumptions ...

This paper examines the volatility and covariance dynamics of cash and futures contracts that underlie the Optimal Hedge Ratio (OHR) across different hedging time horizons. We examine whether hedge ratios calculated over a short term hedging horizon can be scaled and successfully applied to longer term horizons. We also test the equivalence of scaled hedge ratios with those calculated directly ...

We use asymptotic analysis to derive the optimal hedging strategy for an option portfolio hedged using an imperfectly correlated hedging asset with small transaction costs, both fixed per trade and proportional to the value traded. In special cases we opbtain explicit formulae. The hedging strategy involves holding a position in the hedging asset whose value lies between two bounds, which are i...

This paper examines the effect of the maturity of the futures contact used as the hedging instrument on the effectiveness of futures hedging. For this purpose, daily and monthly data on the WTI crude oil futures and spot prices are used to work out the hedge ratios and the measures of hedging effectiveness resulting from using the near-month contract and those resulting from the use of a more d...