Effect of Variance Swap in Hedging Volatility Risk
Effect of Variance Swap in Hedging Volatility Risk
Shen, Yang
2020-07-01 00:00:00
risks Article Yang Shen School of Risk and Actuarial Studies, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia; y.shen@unsw.edu.au Received: 20 May 2020; Accepted: 23 June 2020; Published: 1 July 2020 Abstract: This paper studies the effect of variance swap in hedging volatility risk under the mean-variance criterion. We consider two mean-variance portfolio selection problems under Heston’s stochastic volatility model. In the first problem, the financial market is complete and contains three primitive assets: A bank account, a stock and a variance swap, where the variance swap can be used to hedge against the volatility risk. In the second problem, only the bank account and the stock can be traded in the market, which is incomplete since the idiosyncratic volatility risk is unhedgeable. Under an exponential integrability assumption, we use a linear-quadratic control approach in conjunction with backward stochastic differential equations to solve the two problems. Efficient portfolio strategies and efficient frontiers are derived in closed-form and represented in terms of the unique solutions to backward stochastic differential equations. Numerical examples are provided to compare the solutions to the two problems. It is found that adding the variance swap in the portfolio can remarkably reduce the portfolio risk. Keywords: backward stochastic differential equation; efficient frontier; heston’s model; mean-variance portfolio selection; variance swap 1. Introduction It is widely recognized that the volatility of stocks evolves in a stochastic fashion rather than being constant or deterministic over time. Many empirical studies on stock options reveal that the implied volatility in option price data exhibit the so-called volatility smile/skew, which cannot be explained by the constant-volatility stock price models, say, the geometric Brownian motion model adopted in the Black and Scholes (1973) formula. Tremendous effort has been made to articulate this issue, and various stochastic volatility models have been developed to capture the volatility smile/skew as observed in the market. See, for example, French et al. (1987), Hull and White (1987), Wiggins (1987), Stein and Stein (1991), and Heston (1993). Among these stochastic volatility models, the most commonly used is certainly Heston’s model (Heston 1993). Indeed, the variance process described by Heston’s model follows a single-factor square-root process with mean-reversion, i.e., a Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR) process, which is mathematically tractable even when the instantaneous volatility/variance is assumed to be correlated with the stock price. The early research of Heston’s model focuses on option pricing under this model. Recently, there has been emerging interest in portfolio selection problems under Heston’s model as well as other stochastic volatility models. One direction of research is on maximizing the expected utility from investment and consumption. Kraft (2005) investigates a utility maximization problem and provides an explicit solution of the problem under specific conditions on model parameters. With the help of a martingale criterion, Kallsen and Muhle-Karbe (2010) derive explicit solutions for a power utility maximization problem in a number of affine-form stochastic volatility models. Zeng and Taksar (2013) study an optimal portfolio selection problem under a general stochastic volatility model and obtain closed-form solutions for Heston’s model under more relaxed assumptions. Other relevant works Risks 2020, 8, 70; doi:10.3390/risks8030070 www.mdpi.com/journal/risks Risks 2020, 8, 70 2 of 34 along this direction include, for example, Zariphopoulou (2001), Fleming and Hernández-Hernández (2003), Liu et al. (2003), and Chacko and Viceira (2005). Another direction of research explores the mean-variance hedging, that is, the problem of approximating a given final payoff by a self-financing trading strategy so as to minimize the mean-squared error. Preceding works include Laurent and Pham (1999), Biagini et al. (2000), Hobson (2004), Cerný and Kallsen (2008), to name but only a few. Although portfolio selection problems under Heston’s model have been extensively studied, most existing works concentrate on portfolio selection under the utility-maximization or the mean-variance hedging criteria and few attention has been paid to that under Markowitz (1952)’s mean-variance paradigm. In fact, Markowitz (1952)’s mean-variance criterion and Merton (1969, 1971)’s utility-maximization criterion are both considered precursors of modern portfolio optimization theory, and, to some degree, they are of equal importance in the field. On the other hand, the history of the mean-variance portfolio selection is much longer than that of the mean-variance hedging. In Markowitz (1952), the mean-variance portfolio selection problem is proposed in a single-period discrete-time setting. Using some delicate embedding techniques, Zhou and Li (2000) apply the linear-quadratic (LQ) control theory to solve a continuous-time mean-variance portfolio selection problem analytically. Subsequently, Lim and Zhou (2002), Lim (2004) and Lim (2005) study mean-variance portfolio selection problems with random parameters by using the LQ control and backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs). At first glance, one may consider nesting the mean-variance portfolio selection problem under Heston’s model in Lim and Zhou’s framework. However, this is impossible since the variance process in Heston’s model is unbounded, which violates the boundedness assumption of model parameters in Lim and Zhou’s framework. In fact, a class of nonlinear BSDEs is used to solve mean-variance problems, and this class is termed backward stochastic differential Riccati equations (BSREs). Because there are no general results for BSREs with unbounded coefficients, it is challenging to use BSREs to solve mean-variance problems under Heston’s model. This attracts recent attention to studying mean-variance portfolio selection problems with unbounded random coefficients. See Chiu and Wong (2011, 2014), Shen et al. (2014), Shen and Zeng (2015), Shen (2015), Li et al. (2018), etc. The focus of the the current paper is on demonstrating that volatility derivatives (e.g., variance swap) is effective tool to manage volatility risk when the stock price dynamics is only partially correlated with the stochastic volatility dynamics. Particularly, the advantage of using variance swap contracts is that there is no cost of entering into these contracts since swaps are worth zero at issuance. Compared with other volatility derivatives, e.g., variance and volatility options, variance swaps provide non-directional exposure to volatility risk, which then reduces the need for delta-hedging residual volatility risk. To investigate the effect of variance swaps in hedging volatility risk, in this paper we consider two dynamic mean-variance portfolio selection problems under Heston’s stochastic volatility model in a complete market and an incomplete market, respectively. More specifically, we assume that a bank account, a stock and a variance swap are traded in the complete market and that only the bank account and the stock are traded in the incomplete market. The variance process of the stock is described by Heston’s model and is correlated with the stock price process. Throughout this paper, we make a standing assumption that the variance process/the market price of risk process is exponentially integrable. We employ a combined LQ control and BSDE approach to solve the two problems. To address the issue in the solvability of BSREs with unbounded coefficients, we use measure change techniques and study several transformed BSDEs under equivalent probability measures first. Based on the exponential-integrability assumption, Girsanov’s theorem, Hölder ’s inequality and the one-to-one correspondence relationships between the solutions to the original BSREs and the transformed BSDEs, the uniqueness and existence of solutions to the original BSREs are proved under the real-world probability measure. Due to the Markovian structure, the unique solutions to these BSREs can be represented by the solutions to some Riccati-type ordinary differential equations (ODEs). With the unique solutions to related BSREs, a straightforward application of the Risks 2020, 8, 70 3 of 34 LQ control theory leads to the explicit expressions of the efficient portfolio strategies and the efficient frontiers immediately. To examine the differences of the two problems and the effect of adding the variance swap in the portfolio, we provide numerical examples of the efficient frontiers with different parameter values in the complete and the incomplete markets. It is shown that the variance swap can reduce the overall risk of the terminal wealth through hedging against the volatility risk. In addition, we verify that if the stock price and variance processes are perfectly correlated, the complete market and the incomplete one are indistinguishable. Therefore, the variance swap is an effective tool to hedge idiosyncratic volatility risk. On technical side, this paper somehow extends Shen (2015) and Shen and Zeng (2015) to cater for the current setting. Shen et al. (2014)) consider a mean-variance problem under a constant elasticity of variance (CEV) model. The efficient strategy found in Shen et al. (2014) indeed is in a space smaller than the square-integrable space since the BSDE therein is proved to admit a unique solution in a space accommodating stochastic Lipschitz coefficients, which is smaller than the usually used square-integrable solution space for BSDEs. Shen and Zeng (2015) study an optimal investment-reinsurance problem for insurers under the mean-variance optimization criterion. They impose an exponential integrability condition of order 2 and solve the problem for a modified admissible control set. A similarly modified definition of the admissible set is adopted by Li et al. (2018) to investigate a mean-variance asset-liability management under with stochastic volatility. Though Shen and Zeng (2015) have considered Heston’s model in their framework, they only find the almost surely square-integrable efficient strategy. We should note that in most preceding works as well as the current one, admissible strategies are required to be square-integrable (in an expected sense). By extending some techniques in Shen (2015) developed exclusively for a complete market environment and increasing the order of exponential integrability of the market price of risk, in this paper we manage to find square-integrable efficient portfolio strategies under Heston’s model, where the market may be incomplete. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the basic notation, model dynamics and standing assumption. In Section 3, we formulate two mean-variance portfolio selection problems, one in the complete market with the variance swap and the other in the incomplete market without the variance swap. Using the combined LQ control and BSDE approach, we derive the explicit expressions of the efficient portfolio strategies and the efficient frontiers of the two problems in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. Section 6 provides numerical examples to illustrate the differences of the two problems and the effectiveness of the variance swap in hedging volatility risk. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper. The Appendix contains proofs that can be adapted from the literature. 2. Model Dynamics This section introduces the complete market and the incomplete market, and sets up the model dynamics of primitive assets, including a bank account, a stock and a variance swap. To begin with, we fix a complete probability space (W,F ,P), carrying two one-dimensional, independent standard Brownian motions fW (t)g and fW (t)g . We further equip (W,F ,P) with a right-continuous, 1 t0 2 t0 P-complete filtration F := fF(t)g generated by W () and W (). Here P is a real-world probability t0 1 2 measure. We denote by E[] the expectation taken under P, E [] the conditional expectation under P n > given F(t), jj the Euclidean norm of R , and A the transpose of any vector or matrix A. Let [0, T] be a finite horizon, where T < ¥. For later use, we introduce several spaces of random variables and stochastic processes on (W,F ,P). For any p 2 [1,¥), we define n n L (W;R ): the space of R -valued, F(T)-measurable random variables x such that F(T),P kxk p := fE[jxj ]g < ¥; L (W;R ) F(T),P Risks 2020, 8, 70 4 of 34 n n L (0, T;R ): the space of R -valued, F-adapted processes f () := f f (t)g such that t2[0,T] F,P R 1 p 2 k f ()k := fE[( j f (t)j dt) ]g < ¥; L (0,T;R ) 0 F,P n n S (0, T;R ): the space of R -valued, F-adapted, càdlàg processes f () such that F,P k f ()k := fE[ sup j f (t)j ]g < ¥; S (0,T;R ) F,P t2[0,T] ¥ n n S (0, T;R ): the space of R -valued, F-adapted, essentially bounded, càdlàg processes f () over F,P [0, T] under P; n n E (0, T;R ): the space of R -valued, F-adapted, càdlàg processes f () such that the random F,P variable f := sup j f (t)j has exponential moments of all orders. t2[0,T] Q Q Replacing the expectation E[] by E [], where E [] is the expectation under some probability measure Q equivalent to P, we can define similar spaces of random variables and stochastic processes p p p n n n ¥ n n on (W,F ,Q), i.e., L (0, T;R ), S (0, T;R ), L (W;R ), L (0, T;R ) and E (0, T;R ). F,Q F,Q F,Q F,Q F(T),Q Furthermore, we define the following two spaces of deterministic functions: n n C(0, T;R ): the space of continuous functions f : [0, T] ! R ; n n C (0, T;R ): the space of continuous, uniformly bounded functions f : [0, T] ! R . n 2 Throughout this paper, we will take R to be either R or R in different circumstances. We let P be the risk-neutral probability measure, which will be specified after we introduce our standing assumption. Suppose that the market prices of risks of W () and W () are given by two F-adapted processes fx (t)g and fx (t)g . We denote by fx(t)g the vector process of the 1 t0 2 t0 t0 market prices of risks, where x(t) := (x (t), x (t)) . We will specify the structure of the market prices 1 2 ˜ ˜ of risks later. Indeed, P is a probability measure equivalent to P and the processes fW (t)g and 1 t0 fW (t)g defined by 2 t0 W (t) := W (t) + x (u)du, 1 1 1 and W (t) := W (t) + x (u)du, 2 2 2 ˜ ˜ are two one-dimensional, (F,P)-standard Brownian motions. We denote by E[] the expectation taken ˜ ˜ ˜ under P, and E [] the conditional expectation under P given F(t). The price process of the bank account fP(t)g is given by t0 dP(t) = rP(t)dt, P(0) = 1, (1) where r > 0 represents the risk-free, instantaneous interest rate. In what follows, we introduce the dynamics of the stock and variance processes under the risk-neutral measure P and the real-world measure P sequentially. Under P, the stock price process fS(t)g is governed by t0 dS(t) = S(t) rdt + v(t)dW (t) , S(0) = s > 0, (2) where v(t) is the instantaneous volatility of the stock at time t; the variance processfv(t)g evolves t0 according to Heston’s model q q ˜ ˜ 2 ˜ dv(t) = k q v(t) dt + s v(t) rdW (t) + 1 r dW (t) , v(0) = v > 0. (3) 1 2 Risks 2020, 8, 70 5 of 34 ˜ ˜ Here k ˜ > 0 and q > 0 are the speed of mean-reversion and the long-run average of v(t) under P; s > 0 is the volatility of volatility; the correlation coefficient satisfies r 2 [ 1, 1]. We require that ˜ ˜ the Feller condition is satisfied, i.e., 2k ˜q > s , so that v() is positive, P-a.s. (refer to Chapter 9 in Elliott and Kopp 2005). Though the Feller condition may not be satisfied in practice, market volatility seldom becomes zero. Hence, having the Feller condition in place is meaningful in our model, which guarantees a strictly positive volatility. As in other literature on Heston’s model (see, for example, Zeng and Taksar 2013), we assume that the market prices of risks at time t are given by x (t) := x v(t), x 2 R, 1 1 1 and x (t) := x v(t), x 2 R. 2 2 2 The above specification of the market prices of risks ensures that the evolution of the variance process under the real-world probability measure P has a similar structure of affine drift and square-root volatility of volatility as that under the risk-neutral probability measure P (see Equation (5)). Indeed, this specification is closely related to the completely affine and the essentially affine specifications 2 2 proposed by Duffee (2002). Furthermore, we require x + x 6= 0, which rules out the case that the real-world probability measure P coincides with the risk-neutral probability measure P. Otherwise, the portfolio selection problems do not have non-trivial solutions. Under P, the stock price process fS(t)g follows t0 dS(t) = S(t) r + x v(t) dt + v(t)dW (t) , S(0) = s > 0. (4) 1 1 Here r + x v(t) can be considered as the appreciation rate of the stock at time t. The variance process fv(t)g under P satisfies t0 q q dv(t) = k q v(t) dt + s v(t) rdW (t) + 1 r dW (t) , v(0) = v > 0, (5) 1 2 where k ˜q k := k ˜ sx , q := , x := rx + 1 r x . r r 1 2 k sx k ˜