arXiv subjects

Martin Herdegen

Publications and source records attributed to Martin Herdegen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Optimal Investment and Consumption in Financial Markets with Integrated Variance Clocks

We study the infinite-horizon optimal investment and consumption problem in a general class of continuous financial markets, where uncertainty is driven by a continuous non-decreasing stochastic clock representing accumulated variance. This framework encompasses classical Markovian and non-Markovian stochastic volatility models as well as singular realized-variance models in which no spot volatility process exists. We characterize the value process and optimal investment and consumption strategies in terms of a non-linear infinite-horizon backward stochastic differential equation driven jointly by calendar time and the stochastic clock. We develop a general well-posedness theory for this new class of IVC-BSDEs based on the method of sub- and supersolutions, establishing existence, uniqueness, and stability under natural conditions that might be of independent interest beyond the financial application at hand. We are moreover able to identify the sign of the $Z$-component of the solution using Malliavin calculus. We then apply our results to Volterra Heston models with locally integrable kernels, covering both rough and hyper-rough regimes. Exploiting the affine structure of the model, we verify the optimality of the candidate strategies in incomplete markets and obtain an explicit representation of the solution in the complete market case. Owing to the generality of the framework and the weak assumptions imposed on the stochastic clock, our results unify and extend several existing results for optimal investment and consumption, including classical Markovian stochastic volatility models.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2026

Optimal Dynamic Fees in Automated Market Makers

Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are emerging as a popular decentralised trading platform. In this work, we determine the optimal dynamic fees in a constant function market maker. We find approximate closed-form solutions to the control problem and study the optimal fee structure. We find that there are two distinct fee regimes: one in which the AMM imposes higher fees to deter arbitrageurs, and another where fees are lowered to increase volatility and attract noise traders. Our results also show that dynamic fees that are linear in inventory and are sensitive to changes in the external price are a good approximation of the optimal fee structure and thus constitute suitable candidates when designing fees for AMMs.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2026

The Interplay between Utility and Risk in Portfolio Selection

We revisit the problem of portfolio selection, where an investor maximizes utility subject to a risk constraint. Our framework is very general and accommodates a wide range of utility and risk functionals, including non-concave utilities such as S-shaped utilities from prospect theory and non-convex risk measures such as Value at Risk. Our main contribution is a novel and complete characterization of well-posedness for utility-risk portfolio selection in one period that takes the interplay between the utility and the risk objectives fully into account. We show that under mild regularity conditions the minimal necessary and sufficient condition for well-posedness is given by a very simple either-or criterion: either the utility functional or the risk functional need to satisfy the axiom of sensitivity to large losses. This allows to easily describe well-posedness or ill-posedness for many utility-risk pairs, which we illustrate by a large number of examples. In the special case of expected utility maximization without a risk constraint (but including non-concave utilities), we show that well-posedness is fully characterised by the asymptotic loss-gain ratio, a simple and interpretable quantity that describes the investor's asymptotic relative weighting of large losses versus large gains.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2026

Competition between DEXs through Dynamic Fees

We find an approximate Nash equilibrium in a game between decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that compete for order flow by setting dynamic trading fees. We characterize the equilibrium via a coupled system of partial differential equations and derive tractable approximate closed-form expressions for the equilibrium fees. Our analysis shows that the two-regime structure found in monopoly models persists under competition: pools alternate between raising fees to deter arbitrage and lowering fees to attract noise trading and increase volatility. Under competition, however, the switching boundary shifts from the oracle price to a weighted average of the oracle and competitors' exchange rates. Our numerical experiments show that, holding total liquidity fixed, an increase in the number of competing DEXs reduces execution slippage for strategic liquidity takers and lowers fee revenue per DEX. Finally, the effect on noise traders' slippage depends on market activity: they are worse off in low-activity markets but better off in high-activity ones.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2025

Optimal Investment and Consumption in a Stochastic Factor Model

In this article, we study optimal investment and consumption in an incomplete stochastic factor model for a power utility investor on the infinite horizon. When the state space of the stochastic factor is finite, we give a complete characterisation of the well-posedness of the problem, and provide an efficient numerical algorithm for computing the value function. When the state space is a (possibly infinite) open interval and the stochastic factor is represented by an Itô diffusion, we develop a general theory of sub- and supersolutions for second-order ordinary differential equations on open domains without boundary values to prove existence of the solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation along with explicit bounds for the solution. By characterising the asymptotic behaviour of the solution, we are also able to provide rigorous verification arguments for various models, including -- for the first time -- the Heston model. Finally, we link the discrete and continuous setting and show that that the value function in the diffusion setting can be approximated very efficiently through a fast discretisation scheme.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2024

Existence and uniqueness of quadratic and linear mean-variance equilibria in general semimartingale markets

We revisit the classical topic of quadratic and linear mean-variance equilibria with both financial and real assets. The novelty of our results is that they are the first allowing for equilibrium prices driven by general semimartingales and hold in discrete as well as continuous time. For agents with quadratic utility functions, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of equilibria. We complement our analysis by providing explicit examples showing non-uniqueness or non-existence of equilibria. We then study the more difficult case of linear mean-variance preferences. We first show that under mild assumptions, a linear mean-variance equilibrium corresponds to a quadratic equilibrium (for different preference parameters). We then use this link to study a fixed-point problem that establishes existence (and uniqueness in a suitable class) of linear mean-variance equilibria. Our results rely on fine properties of dynamic mean-variance hedging in general semimartingale markets.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2024

Market Making with Exogenous Competition

We study liquidity provision in the presence of exogenous competition. We consider a `reference market maker' who monitors her inventory and the aggregated inventory of the competing market makers. We assume that the competing market makers use a `rule of thumb' to determine their posted depths, depending linearly on their inventory. By contrast, the reference market maker optimises over her posted depths, and we assume that her fill probability depends on the difference between her posted depths and the competition's depths in an exponential way. For a linear-quadratic goal functional, we show that this model admits an approximate closed-form solution. We illustrate the features of our model and compare against alternative ways of solving the problem either via an Euler scheme or state-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2024

$ρ$-arbitrage and $ρ$-consistent pricing for star-shaped risk measures

This paper revisits mean-risk portfolio selection in a one-period financial market, where risk is quantified by a star-shaped risk measure $ρ$. We make three contributions. First, we introduce the new axiom of sensitivity to large expected losses and show that it is key to ensure the existence of optimal portfolios. Second, we give primal and dual characterisations of (strong) $ρ$-arbitrage. Finally, we use our conditions for the absence of (strong) $ρ$-arbitrage to explicitly derive the (strong) $ρ$-consistent price interval for an external financial contract.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2024

Risk, utility and sensitivity to large losses

Risk and utility functionals are fundamental building blocks in economics and finance. In this paper we investigate under which conditions a risk or utility functional is sensitive to the accumulation of losses in the sense that any sufficiently large multiple of a position that exposes an agent to future losses has positive risk or negative utility. We call this property sensitivity to large losses and provide necessary and sufficient conditions thereof that are easy to check for a very large class of risk and utility functionals. In particular, our results do not rely on convexity and can therefore also be applied to most examples discussed in the recent literature, including (non-convex) star-shaped risk measures or S-shaped utility functions encountered in prospect theory. As expected, Value at Risk generally fails to be sensitive to large losses. More surprisingly, this is also true of Expected Shortfall. By contrast, expected utility functionals as well as (optimized) certainty equivalents are proved to be sensitive to large losses for many standard choices of concave and nonconcave utility functions, including $S$-shaped utility functions. We also show that Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall become sensitive to large losses if they are either properly adjusted or if the property is suitably localized.

q-fin.RM↗

arXiv2024

Portfolio Optimization under Transaction Costs with Recursive Preferences

The Merton investment-consumption problem is fundamental, both in the field of finance, and in stochastic control. An important extension of the problem adds transaction costs, which is highly relevant from a financial perspective but also challenging from a control perspective because the solution now involves singular control. A further significant extension takes us from additive utility to stochastic differential utility (SDU), which allows time preferences and risk preferences to be disentangled. In this paper, we study this extended version of the Merton problem with proportional transaction costs and Epstein-Zin SDU. We fully characterise all parameter combinations for which the problem is well posed (which may depend on the level of transaction costs) and provide a full verification argument that relies on no additional technical assumptions and uses primal methods only. The case with SDU requires new mathematical techniques as duality methods break down. Even in the special case of (additive) power utility, our arguments are significantly simpler, more elegant and more far-reaching than the ones in the extant literature. This means that we can easily analyse aspects of the problem which previously have been very challenging, including comparative statics, boundary cases which heretofore have required separate treatment and the situation beyond the small transaction cost regime. A key and novel idea is to parametrise consumption and the value function in terms of the shadow fraction of wealth, which may be of much wider applicability.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

An elementary proof of the dual representation of Expected Shortfall

We provide an elementary proof of the dual representation of Expected Shortfall on the space of integrable random variables over a general probability space. Unlike the results in the extant literature, our proof only exploits basic properties of quantile functions and can thus be easily implemented in any graduate course on risk measures. As a byproduct, we obtain a new proof of the subadditivity of Expected Shortfall.

q-fin.RM↗

arXiv2023

A continuity theorem for generalised signed measures with an application to Karamata's Tauberian theorem

The Laplace transforms of positive measures on $\mathbb{R}_{+}$ converge if and only if their distribution functions converge at continuity points of the limiting measure. We extend this classical continuity theorem to the case of generalised signed Radon measures. The result for the signed case requires some additional conditions, which follow from recent results on vague convergence of signed Radon measures. As an application, we introduce a novel Tauberian condition for generalised signed Radon measures that extends Karamata's Tauberian theorem.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Model-based gym environments for limit order book trading

Within the mathematical finance literature there is a rich catalogue of mathematical models for studying algorithmic trading problems -- such as market-making and optimal execution -- in limit order books. This paper introduces \mbtgym, a Python module that provides a suite of gym environments for training reinforcement learning (RL) agents to solve such model-based trading problems. The module is set up in an extensible way to allow the combination of different aspects of different models. It supports highly efficient implementations of vectorized environments to allow faster training of RL agents. In this paper, we motivate the challenge of using RL to solve such model-based limit order book problems in mathematical finance, we explain the design of our gym environment, and then demonstrate its use in solving standard and non-standard problems from the literature. Finally, we lay out a roadmap for further development of our module, which we provide as an open source repository on GitHub so that it can serve as a focal point for RL research in model-based algorithmic trading.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2022

Vague and weak convergence of signed measures

Necessary and sufficient conditions for weak and vague convergence of measures are important for a diverse host of applications. This paper aims to give a comprehensive description of the relationship between the two modes of convergence when the measures are signed, which is largely absent from the literature. Furthermore, when the underlying space is $\mathbb{R}$, we study the relationship between vague convergence of signed measures and the pointwise convergence of their distribution functions.

math.FA↗

arXiv2022

Bubbles in discrete time models

We introduce a new definition of speculative bubbles in discrete-time models based on the discounted stock price losing mass at some finite drop-down under an equivalent martingale measure. We provide equivalent probabilistic characterisations of this definition and give examples of discrete-time martingales that are speculative bubbles and those that are not. In the Markovian case, we provide sufficient analytic conditions for the presence of speculative bubbles. We also show that the existence of speculative bubbles is directly linked to the existence of a non-trivial solution to a linear Volterra integral equation of the second kind involving the Markov kernel. Finally, we show that our definition of speculative bubbles in discrete time is consistent with the strict local martingale definition of speculative bubbles in continuous time in the sense that a properly discretised strict local martingale in continuous time is a speculative bubble in discrete time.

math.PR↗

arXiv2021

Proper solutions for Epstein-Zin Stochastic Differential Utility

In this article, we consider the optimal investment-consumption problem for an agent with preferences governed by Epstein--Zin stochastic differential utility (EZ-SDU) who invests in a constant-parameter Black-Scholes-Merton market over the infinite horizon. The parameter combinations that we consider in this paper are such that the risk aversion parameter $R$ and the elasticity of intertemporal complementarity $S$ satisfy $θ=\frac{1-R}{1-S}>1$. In this sense, this paper is complementary to Herdegen, Hobson and Jerome [arXiv:2107.06593]. The main novelty of the case $θ>1$ (as opposed to $θ\in(0,1)$) is that there is an infinite family of utility processes associated to every nonzero consumption stream. To deal with this issue, we introduce the economically motivated notion of a proper utility process, where, roughly speaking, a utility process is proper if it is nonzero whenever future consumption is nonzero. We then proceed to show that for a very wide class of consumption streams $C$, there exists a proper utility process $V$ associated to $C$. Furthermore, for a wide class of consumption streams $C$, the proper utility process $V$ is unique. Finally, we solve the optimal investment-consumption problem in a constant parameter financial market, where we optimise over the right-continuous attainable consumption streams that have a unique proper utility process associated to them.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2021

Liquidity Provision with Adverse Selection and Inventory Costs

We study one-shot Nash competition between an arbitrary number of identical dealers that compete for the order flow of a client. The client trades either because of proprietary information, exposure to idiosyncratic risk, or a mix of both trading motives. When quoting their price schedules, the dealers do not know the client's type but only its distribution, and in turn choose their price quotes to mitigate between adverse selection and inventory costs. Under essentially minimal conditions, we show that a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium exists and can be characterized by the solution of a nonlinear ODE.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2021

Mean-$ρ$ portfolio selection and $ρ$-arbitrage for coherent risk measures

We revisit mean-risk portfolio selection in a one-period financial market where risk is quantified by a positively homogeneous risk measure $ρ$. We first show that under mild assumptions, the set of optimal portfolios for a fixed return is nonempty and compact. However, unlike in classical mean-variance portfolio selection, it can happen that no efficient portfolios exist. We call this situation $ρ$-arbitrage, and prove that it cannot be excluded -- unless $ρ$ is as conservative as the worst-case risk measure. After providing a primal characterisation of $ρ$-arbitrage, we focus our attention on coherent risk measures that admit a dual representation and give a necessary and sufficient dual characterisation of $ρ$-arbitrage. We show that the absence of $ρ$-arbitrage is intimately linked to the interplay between the set of equivalent martingale measures (EMMs) for the discounted risky assets and the set of absolutely continuous measures in the dual representation of $ρ$. A special case of our result shows that the market does not admit $ρ$-arbitrage for Expected Shortfall at level $α$ if and only if there exists an EMM $\mathbb{Q} \approx \mathbb{P}$ such that $\Vert \frac{\text{d}\mathbb{Q}}{\text{d}\mathbb{P}} \Vert_\infty < \frac{1}α$.

q-fin.MF↗