We examine Kreps' (2019) conjecture that optimal expected utility in the classic Black--Scholes--Merton (BSM) economy is the limit of optimal expected utility for a sequence of discrete-time economies that "approach" the BSM economy in a natural sense: The $n$th discrete-time economy is generated by a scaled $n$-step random walk, based on an unscaled random variable $\zeta$ with mean zero, variance one, and bounded support. We confirm Kreps' conjecture if the consumer's utility function $U$ has asymptotic elasticity strictly less than one, and we provide a counterexample to the conjecture for a utility function $U$ with asymptotic elasticity equal to 1, for $\zeta$ such that $E[\zeta^3] > 0.$

We study the approximation of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs for short) with a constraint on the gains process. We first discretize the constraint by applying a so-called facelift operator at times of a grid. We show that this discretely constrained BSDE converges to the continuously constrained one as the mesh grid converges to zero. We then focus on the approximation of the discretely constrained BSDE. For that we adopt a machine learning approach. We show that the facelift can be approximated by an optimization problem over a class of neural networks under constraints on the neural network and its derivative. We then derive an algorithm converging to the discretely constrained BSDE as the number of neurons goes to infinity. We end by numerical experiments. Mathematics Subject Classification (2010): 65C30, 65M75, 60H35, 93E20, 49L25.

In this paper, we consider the problem of equal risk pricing and hedging in which the fair price of an option is the price that exposes both sides of the contract to the same level of risk. Focusing for the first time on the context where risk is measured according to convex risk measures, we establish that the problem reduces to solving independently the writer and the buyer's hedging problem with zero initial capital. By further imposing that the risk measures decompose in a way that satisfies a Markovian property, we provide dynamic programming equations that can be used to solve the hedging problems for both the case of European and American options. All of our results are general enough to accommodate situations where the risk is measured according to a worst-case risk measure as is typically done in robust optimization. Our numerical study illustrates the advantages of equal risk pricing over schemes that only account for a single party, pricing based on quadratic hedging (i.e. $\epsilon$-arbitrage pricing), or pricing based on a fixed equivalent martingale measure (i.e. Black-Scholes pricing). In particular, the numerical results confirm that when employing an equal risk price both the writer and the buyer end up being exposed to risks that are more similar and on average smaller than what they would experience with the other approaches.

This paper studies the bail-out optimal dividend problem with regime switching under the constraint that the cumulative dividend strategy is absolutely continuous. We confirm the optimality of the regime-modulated refraction-reflection strategy when the underlying risk model follows a general spectrally negative Markov additive process. To verify the conjecture of a barrier type optimal control, we first introduce and study an auxiliary problem with the final payoff at an exponential terminal time and characterize the optimal threshold explicitly using fluctuation identities of the refracted-reflected Levy process. Second, we transform the problem with regime-switching into an equivalent local optimization problem with a final payoff up to the first regime switching time. The refraction-reflection strategy with regime-modulated thresholds can be shown as optimal by using results in the first step and some fixed point arguments for auxiliary recursive iterations.

In a recent paper, we have demonstrated how the affinity between TPUs and multi-dimensional financial simulation resulted in fast Monte Carlo simulations that could be setup in a few lines of python Tensorflow code. We also presented a major benefit from writing high performance simulations in an automated differentiation language such as Tensorflow: a single line of code enabled us to estimate sensitivities, i.e. the rate of change in price of financial instrument with respect to another input such as the interest rate, the current price of the underlying, or volatility. Such sensitivities (otherwise known as the famous financial "Greeks") are fundamental for risk assessment and risk mitigation. In the present follow-up short paper, we extend the developments exposed in our previous work about the use of Tensor Processing Units and Tensorflow for TPUs.

Foreign exchange rates movements exhibit significant cross-correlations even on very short time-scales. The effect of these statistical relationships become evident during extreme market events, such as flash crashes.In this scenario, an abrupt price swing occurring on a given market is immediately followed by anomalous movements in several related foreign exchange rates. Although a deep understanding of cross-currency correlations would be clearly beneficial for conceiving more stable and safer foreign exchange markets, the microscopic origins of these interdependencies have not been extensively investigated. We introduce an agent-based model which describes the emergence of cross-currency correlations from the interactions between market makers and an arbitrager. Our model qualitatively replicates the time-scale vs. cross-correlation diagrams observed in real trading data, suggesting that triangular arbitrage plays a primary role in the entanglement of the dynamics of different foreign exchange rates. Furthermore, the model shows how the features of the cross-correlation function between two foreign exchange rates, such as its sign and value, emerge from the interplay between triangular arbitrage and trend-following strategies.

In this paper we study a class of time-inconsistent terminal Markovian control problems in discrete time subject to model uncertainty. We combine the concept of the sub-game perfect strategies with the adaptive robust stochastic to tackle the theoretical aspects of the considered stochastic control problem. Consequently, as an important application of the theoretical results, by applying a machine learning algorithm we solve numerically the mean-variance portfolio selection problem under the model uncertainty.