Fin 500Q – Quantitative Risk Management
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Fin 500Q – Quantitative Risk Management
Midterm 2
For these questions, you must show your work to get full credit.
1. Suppose a hedger has an initial position in stock A, and wants to hedge the risks of this initial position at the horizon T1 = 0.5 year. The available hedging instrument is a futures contract on one unit of stock B. The futures contract has maturity T2 > T1 and pays off FB,T1 - FB,0 (to the long side) at time T1 , where FB,t is the price at t of a futures contract on B that matures at T2 .
The time-0 prices of the two stocks are SA,0 = 100 and SB,0 = 150, and the annual volatilities of the stock returns are σA = 0.25 and σB = 0.2. The correlation between the two stocks is ρ = 0.75. The annual continuously compounded risk-free rate is RF = 5%.
For the first part of this question, assume that T2 = 0.5 (= T1 ).
(a) [2 points] What is the optimal hedging position in the futures contract?
(b) [2 points] What is the variance of the payoff of the total hedged position?
For the remaining questions, now suppose that T2 = 5.
(c) [1 point] Write down the futures price at T1 as a function of ST1 .
(d) [2 points] What is now the optimal hedging position in the futures contract?
(e) [2 points] How does the variance of the payoff of the hedged position compare to the value in (b): is it smaller, the same, or bigger? Why? (Hint: you do not need to perform any additional calculations to answer this question.)
2021-12-03