Regents Lecture: Dr. Bruno Dupire, Bloomberg and NYU

Event Date: 

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 - 3:15pm
Thursday, April 26, 2007 - 4:00pm

Event Date Details: 

April 25th: Refreshments served at 3:00pm

Hosted by: The Department of Statistics & Applied Probability, UCSB & The Center for Research in Financial Mathematics & Statistics

2006-2007 Regents Lecture

Speaker:

Dr. Bruno Dupire, Bloomberg and NYU

Dr. Bruno Dupire is best known for his work on volatility modeling. He pioneered the "local volatility" models (1993) and subsequently the "stochastic volatility" models widely used to fit option prices. His recent work includes pricing and hedging of volatility derivatives and optimal delta hedging strategies. Dr. Dupire has headed the Derivatives Research teams at Societe Generale, Paribas Capital Market and Nikko Financial Products. He joined the Quantitative Research group at Bloomberg in New York in January 2004 to develop arbitrage strategies, derivatives models, and numerical methods. He is a Fellow and Adjunct Professor at NYU. Dr. Dupire was inducted in the Risk Magazine "Hall of Fame" (2002) as one of the 50 most influential people in Derivatives. He is the most contributing practitioner over the last 5 years in the industry survey of ICBI Global Derivatives, and he is the 2006 winner of the Wilmott Award for Contribution to Quantitative Finance (Cutting Edge Research).

Program:

Day 1: Applications of the Root Solution of the Skorohod Embedding Problem in Finance

Abstract:

The Skorokhod embedding problem amounts to stopping a Brownian motion to hit a target density; it has interesting implications for finance: 

  • Any solution leads to a model that is calibrated to the option prices of a given maturity and
  • It provides a rule to sell a (martingale) asset in order to achieve a prescribed wealth distribution. We concentrate on the Root Solution (hitting time of a barrier), which provides a canonical mapping of a density into a stopping region. We examine
  1. the implications in terms of options on realized variance
  2. new Monte Carlo schemes which confine the increments in both space and time at each time step

Day 2: An Idiot's Guide to Option Pricing: 2006-07 Regents Lecture

Abstract:

Option pricing puzzles the intuition; for instance the fair price of an option that pays when the market goes up does not depend on the probability the market goes up! We present and illustrate the main principles of option pricing, such as uncertainty modeling, arbitrage, completeness, risk neutrality, hedging, dominance, forward quantities, numerical methods,.... We make liberal use of toy examples to illustrate main concepts and paradoxes.