There are many references showing that a classical solution to the Black–Scholes equation is a stochastic solution. However, it is the converse of this theorem which is most relevant in applications and the converse is also more mathematically interesting. In the present article we establish such a converse. We find a Feynman–Kac type theorem showing that the stochastic representation yields a ...

When we studied discrete-time models we used martingale pricing to derive the Black-Scholes formula for European options. It was clear, however, that we could also have used a replicating strategy argument to derive the formula. In this part of the course, we will use the replicating strategy argument in continuous time to derive the Black-Scholes partial differential equation. We will use this...

European options can be priced using the analytical solution of the Black-Scholes-Merton differential equation with the appropriate boundary conditions. A different approach and the one commonly used in situations where no analytical solution is available is the Monte Carlo Simulation. We present the results of Monte Carlo simulations for pricing European options and we compare with the analyti...

The field of mathematical finance has gained significant attention since Black and Scholes (1973) published their Nobel Prize work in 1973. Using some simplifying economic assumptions, they derived a linear partial differential equation (PDE) of convection–diffusion type which can be applied to the pricing of options. The solution of the linear PDE can be obtained analytically. In this paper we...

Option trading forms part of our financial markets. A traded option gives to its owner the right to buy (call option) or to sell (put option) a fixed quantity of assets of a specified stock at a fixed price (exercise or strike price). There are two major types of traded options. One is the American option that can be exercised at any time prior to its expiry date, and the other option, which ca...

Stochastic differential equations and the Black-Scholes PDE. We derived the BlackScholes formula by using arbitrage (risk-neutral) valuation in a discrete-time, binomial tree setting, then passing to a continuum limit. This section explores an alternative, continuoustime approach via the Ito calculus and the Black-Scholes differential equation. This material is very standard; I like Wilmott-How...

The Black-Scholes equation is a hallmark of mathematical finance, and any study of this growing field would be incomplete without having seen and understood the logic behind this equation. The initial focus of this paper will be to explore the arguments leading to the equation and the financial background necessary to understand the arguments. The problem of estimating the only parameter which ...

In this paper we apply the innovative Laplace transformation method introduced by Sheen, Sloan, and Thomée (IMA J. Numer. Anal., 2003) to solve the Black-Scholes equation. The algorithm is of arbitrary high convergence rate and naturally parallelizable. It is shown that the method is very efficient for calculating various option prices. Existence and uniqueness properties of the Laplace transfo...

This is the first of two papers in which we consider a stock with price process defined by a stochastic differential equation driven by a process Y (·) different from Brownian motion. The adoption of such a colored noise input is motivated by an analysis of real market data. The process Y (·) is defined by a continuous-time AR(∞)-type equation and may have either short or long memory. We show t...