Salta ai contenuti. | Salta alla navigazione

Strumenti personali

STOCHASTIC CALCULUS WITH APPLICATIONS TO FINANCIAL MARKETS

Academic year and teacher
If you can't find the course description that you're looking for in the above list, please see the following instructions >>
Versione italiana
Academic year
2016/2017
Teacher
ALESSANDRA BORRELLI
Credits
6
Didactic period
Secondo Semestre
SSD
MAT/07

Training objectives

Aim of the course is providing to the students, in addition to a good knowledge of elementary financial mathematics, the mathematical methods and the basic concepts of the modern financial mathematics.
At the end of the course the main knowledge acquired will be
• basic concepts concerning bonds, stocks and derivative securities, financial markets, financial laws and arbitrage portfolio
• mathematical properties of options
• concept of stochastic process and some properties of particular stochastic processes
• integral and differential stochastic calculus
• models of stock prices
• Black-Scholes formula for the price of European call and put options, its extensions and applications.
At the end of the course the student will be able
• to recognize the risk of the securities
• to valuate the convenience of loans by means TAN and TAEG
• to evaluate the profitability of a project by using present net value (PNV) method
• to solve linear stochastic differential equations
• to valuate the price of European call or put options before exercise time
• to use Delta-hedging strategy
• to valuate stocks and bonds of a firm by means of Black-Scholes formula
• to expose the topics presented in the course by using the financial language.

Prerequisites

Differential and integral calculus of real functions.
Basic concepts in calculus of probability

Course programme

The course is scheduled in 48 hours.
The programme is composed of three parts.
PART 1
FINANCIAL MARKETS: bonds, stocks, derivative securities, financial markets, Stock Exchange, financial laws, annuities, forward and futures, basic concepts about options, swap, warrant, convertible bonds, arbitrage portfolio (10 hours)
MATEMATICAL PROPERTIES OF THE OPTIONS: mathematical properties of European and American call options, parity put – call, use of the options, exotic options (4 hours).
PART 2
FUNDAMENTALS OF PROBABILITY: probability space, random variables, integration of a random variable with respect to a probability measure, independence of random variables, moments of a random variable, conditional expectations (8 hours)
STOCHASTIC PROCESSES: definition of stochastic process, martingales, Wiener process and its properties (4 hours)
CLASSICAL CALCULUS AND STOCHASTIC CALCULUS: Riemann-Stieltjes integral, definition of Ito stochastic integral, example of the calculation of an Ito integral, properties of Ito integral (7 hours)
STOCHASTIC DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS: Ito process and definition of stochastic differential, Ito formula and its applications, stochastic differential equations, strong and weak solutions, strong solution existence and uniqueness theorem, linear stochastic differential equations, examples, geometric process and its properties (5 hours).
PART 3
BLACK-SCHOLES MODEL TO VALUATE THE PRICE OF CALL OPTIONS: stock prices mathematical models, valuation of the price of European call options: Black-Scholes equation and the solution to the problem of Black and Scholes with final value, calculations of the Greeks and other derivatives of the functions c of Black-Scholes formula (6 hours)
EXTENSIONS OF BLACK -SCHOLES FORMULA AND ITS APPLICATIONS: Black - Scholes formula for American call options and for European put options, perpetual American put, extensions of Black- Scholes model, applications of Black –Scholes formula: valuation of bonds and stocks of a firm, Delta-hedging strategy, real options (4 hours).

Didactic methods

The course is organized in class lectures, exercises and examples about all topics of the programme.
The students may attend additional seminars about numerical simulations, that are advised but not compulsory. During the seminars some projects are proposed.

Learning assessment procedures

The aim of the final exam consists in verifying the level of knowledge of the formative objectives previously stated.
The final exam consists in an oral discussion on the subjects of the course.
The fist question concerns a topic chosen by the student that must be exposed in a detailed way. The other questions on the remaining part of the programme have the objective to verify the comprehension of the basic concepts and the ability to link and compare different aspects discussed in the course. For this reason details are not required. The answer to the first question is equivalent of 40% of the final mark of the exam.
Moreover the students may obtain an increase till 5 to final mark developing one of the projects proposed during the additional seminars.

Reference texts

Lecture Notes are available at the course Web site.

Specific topics can be futher developed on
E. Agliardi, R. Agliardi: "Mercati finanziari. Analisi stocastica delle opzioni", Mc Graw-Hill, 2001.
A. Pascucci: Calcolo stocastico per la finanza, Springer, 2007.
B. Oksendal: Stochastic Differential Equations, Springer, 2005.