Paper detail

Hedging of time discrete auto-regressive stochastic volatility options

Numerous empirical proofs indicate the adequacy of the time discrete auto-regressive stochastic volatility models introduced by Taylor in the description of the log-returns of financial assets. The pricing and hedging of contingent products that use these models for their underlying assets is a non-trivial exercise due to the incomplete nature of the corresponding market. In this paper we apply two volatility estimation techniques available in the literature for these models, namely Kalman filtering and the hierarchical-likelihood approach, in order to implement various pricing and dynamical hedging strategies. Our study shows that the local risk minimization scheme developed by Föllmer, Schweizer, and Sondermann is particularly appropriate in this setup, especially for at and in the money options or for low hedging frequencies.