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Roberto Daluiso

Publications and source records attributed to Roberto Daluiso.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

Rough volatility dynamics in commodity markets

In this paper, we develop a general rough volatility model for commodities that provides an automatic calibration of the initial term structure of the futures prices and an appropriate treatment of the Samuelson effect. After the theoretical analysis of this general model, we focus on the rBergomi and rHeston models and their calibration to market data of vanilla futures options on WTI Crude Oil. Finally, numerical results illustrate the performance of the proposed rough volatility models for commodities pricing.

q-fin.PR

Time-Inhomogeneous Volatility Aversion for Financial Applications of Reinforcement Learning

In finance, sequential decision problems are often faced, for which reinforcement learning (RL) emerges as a promising tool for optimisation without the need of analytical tractability. However, the objective of classical RL is the expected cumulated reward, while financial applications typically require a trade-off between return and risk. In this work, we focus on settings where one cares about the time split of the total return, ruling out most risk-aware generalisations of RL which optimise a risk measure defined on the latter. We notice that a preference for homogeneous splits, which we found satisfactory for hedging, can be unfit for other problems, and therefore propose a new risk metric which still penalises uncertainty of the single rewards, but allows for an arbitrary planning of their target levels. We study the properties of the resulting objective and the generalisation of learning algorithms to optimise it. Finally, we show numerical results on toy examples.

q-fin.CP

Optimal strategy and deep hedging for share repurchase programs

In recent decades, companies have frequently adopted share repurchase programs to return capital to shareholders or for other strategic purposes, instructing investment banks to rapidly buy back shares on their behalf. When the executing institution is allowed to hedge its exposure, it encounters several challenges due to the intrinsic features of the product. Moreover, contractual clauses or market regulations on trading activity may make it infeasible to rely on Greeks. In this work, we address the hedging of these products by developing a machine-learning framework that determines the optimal execution of the buyback while explicitly accounting for the bank's actual trading capabilities. This unified treatment of execution and hedging yields substantial performance improvements, resulting in an optimized policy that provides a feasible and realistic hedging approach. The pricing of these programs can be framed in terms of the discount that banks offer to the client on the price at which the shares are delivered. Since, in our framework, risk measures serve as objective functions, we exploit the concept of indifference pricing to compute this discount, thereby capturing the actual execution performance.

q-fin.PR

CVA Hedging by Risk-Averse Stochastic-Horizon Reinforcement Learning

This work studies the dynamic risk management of the risk-neutral value of the potential credit losses on a portfolio of derivatives. Sensitivities-based hedging of such liability is sub-optimal because of bid-ask costs, pricing models which cannot be completely realistic, and a discontinuity at default time. We leverage recent advances on risk-averse Reinforcement Learning developed specifically for option hedging with an ad hoc practice-aligned objective function aware of pathwise volatility, generalizing them to stochastic horizons. We formalize accurately the evolution of the hedger's portfolio stressing such aspects. We showcase the efficacy of our approach by a numerical study for a portfolio composed of a single FX forward contract.

q-fin.CP

Fast and Stable Credit Gamma of CVA

Credit Valuation Adjustment is a balance sheet item which is nowadays subject to active risk management by specialized traders. However, one of the most important risk factors, which is the vector of default intensities of the counterparty, affects in a non-differentiable way the most general Monte Carlo estimator of the adjustment, through simulation of default times. Thus the computation of first and second order (pure and mixed) sensitivities involving these inputs cannot rely on direct path-wise differentiation, while any approach involving finite differences shows very high statistical noise. We present ad hoc analytical estimators which overcome these issues while offering very low runtime overheads over the baseline computation of the price adjustment. We also discuss the conversion of the so-obtained sensitivities to model parameters (e.g. default intensities) into sensitivities to market quotes (e.g. Credit Default Swap spreads).

q-fin.CP

Reinforcement learning for options on target volatility funds

In this work we deal with the funding costs rising from hedging the risky securities underlying a target volatility strategy (TVS), a portfolio of risky assets and a risk-free one dynamically rebalanced in order to keep the realized volatility of the portfolio on a certain level. The uncertainty in the TVS risky portfolio composition along with the difference in hedging costs for each component requires to solve a control problem to evaluate the option prices. We derive an analytical solution of the problem in the Black and Scholes (BS) scenario. Then we use Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to determine the fund composition leading to the most conservative price under the local volatility (LV) model, for which an a priori solution is not available. We show how the performances of the RL agents are compatible with those obtained by applying path-wise the BS analytical strategy to the TVS dynamics, which therefore appears competitive also in the LV scenario.

q-fin.PR

Pricing commodity swing options

In commodity and energy markets swing options allow the buyer to hedge against futures price fluctuations and to select its preferred delivery strategy within daily or periodic constraints, possibly fixed by observing quoted futures contracts. In this paper we focus on the natural gas market and we present a dynamical model for commodity futures prices able to calibrate liquid market quotes and to imply the volatility smile for futures contracts with different delivery periods. We implement the numerical problem by means of a least-square Monte Carlo simulation and we investigate alternative approaches based on reinforcement learning algorithms.

q-fin.PR