Using Risk-Neutral Valuation to Check Heston Claim Prices
Summary
The document considers whether a contingent claim paying the square root of the stock price can be added to a Heston market without creating arbitrage. The proposed price is a solution to a pricing PDE, and the questioner tries to construct a positive process that turns the bank account, stock, and claim prices into local martingales. The answers suggest a simpler route: use the Feynman–Kac representation to identify the PDE solution with the discounted conditional expectation of the claim payoff under the relevant pricing measure.
If the discounted stock is a martingale under that measure, the stock and the claim have discounted martingale prices, supporting the arbitrage-free interpretation of the PDE price. The response points to an integrability condition for the stock’s stochastic exponential. That condition is an assumption to verify for the model and time horizon; the short exchange does not establish it in full generality or address every technical condition needed for the pricing representation.
Key ideas
- A pricing PDE can be connected to a discounted conditional expectation through Feynman–Kac.
- The claim price is represented as the discounted expected value of its terminal payoff under a pricing measure.
- Martingale discounted prices for the stock and claim support an arbitrage-free pricing interpretation.
- The stock martingale argument relies on an integrability condition that must be checked.
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Full text
# arbitrage in Heston model
# arbitrage in Heston model
Really struggling in this question:
Consider a market with two assets $(B,S)$ whose price dynamics satisfy \begin{equation} dB_t = B_t r dt \end{equation} \begin{equation} \quad \quad \quad \quad \, \, \, \, \, \, \, dS_t = S_t ( r dt + \sqrt{v_t} dW_t) \end{equation} \begin{equation} \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \, \, \, \, \, \, dv_t = (a -b v_t ) dt + c \sqrt {v_t} ( \rho dW_t + \sqrt{ 1- \rho^2} dZ_t), \end{equation} where $r, a, b, c \text{ and } \rho$ are constants, with $a,b>0$ and $-1 \leq \rho \leq 1$, and $W$ and $Z$ are independent Brownian motions.
Let $F: [0,T] \times \mathbb{R}_{+} \times \mathbb{R}_{+} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}_{+} $ satisfy the PDE \begin{equation} \frac{\partial F}{\partial t} + Sr \frac{\partial F}{\partial S} + (a-b v_t) \frac{\partial F}{\partial v} + \frac{1}{2} S^2 v\frac{{\partial}^2 F}{\partial S^2} + c \rho Sv \frac{{\partial}^2 F}{\partial S \partial v} + \frac{1}{2} c^2 v \frac{ {\partial}^2 F}{\partial v^2} = rF, \end{equation} with boundary conditions $F(T,S,v) = \sqrt{S}$.
Introduce a contingent claim with payout $\xi_T = \sqrt{S_T}$.
The problem is to show that in the augmented market, there is a strictly positive Ito process $(Y_t)_{t \geq 0}$ such that $(Y_t ( B_t, S_t, \xi_t))_{t \geq 0}$ is a local martingale, if the time-$t$ price of the contingent claim is given by $\xi_t = F(t, S_t, v_t)$.
What I have done so far (applying Ito's formula and using the PDE): \begin{equation} d \xi_t = r F(t, S_t, v_t) dt + \bigg( \frac{\partial F}{\partial S} (t, S_t, v_t) \sqrt{v_t} + \frac{\partial F}{\partial v} (t, S_t, v_t) c \sqrt{v_t} \rho \bigg) dW_t + \frac{\partial F}{\partial v} (t, S_t, v_t) c \sqrt{v_t} \sqrt{1-\rho^2} dZ_t. \end{equation} I try out $Y$ with $dY_t = m_t dt + n_t dW_t + q_t dZ_t$, for processes $(m_t)$, $(n_t)$ and $(q_t)$.
The first condition that $(Y_t B_t)$ is a local martingale tells us that $m_t=0$.
The second condition that $(Y_t B_t)$ is a local martingale seems to tell us that $n_t= Y_t ( \frac{-r}{1+\sqrt{v_t}})$.
Unfortunately, the expression for $q_t$ is so complicated that I cannot conclude from there that $(Y_t)$ is strictly positive. Any ideas???
## Answer by Mark Joshi (score 1)
https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/15661
Show that the discounted expectation price of the new security is the same as the solution of the PDE. Once this is done all three assets have discounted price processes which are martingales so there can be no arbitrage.
## Answer by Sergio Almada (score 0)
https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/15667
Mark Joshi has pretty much solved it. To add to it, you can see that from Feynamn Kac (see remarks in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman–Kac_formula ) it follows that $$ F(t,S,v) = B_t \mathbf{E}\left[ \frac{ \sqrt{ S_T } }{ B_T } \big \vert S_t = S, v_t = v \right], $$ where the expectation is taken with respect to a measure where $W$ and $Z$ are independent Brownian Motions. Note how this measure coincides with the risk neutral measure if the process $M_t = S_tB_t^{-1}$ is a martingale: risk neutral measure is the measure so that the underlying expressed in the savings account units is a martingale.
So because of the equality above, if you show that $M_t$ is a martingale, then the price given as a solution to the pde is indeed arbitrage free. Now, this is easy, since $$ dM_t = \sqrt{v_t} M_t dW_t, $$ which is a martingale in the Heston Model, by Novikov's condition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov's_condition): $$ \mathbf{E} \left[ e^{ \int_0^T v_r dr} \right] < \infty. $$Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)
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