IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rfa/aefjnl/v7y2020i4p138-146.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How Much Is Your Strangle Worth? On the Relative Value of the Strangle under the Black-Scholes Pricing Model

Author

Listed:
  • Ben Boukai

Abstract

Trading option strangles is a highly popular strategy often used by market participants to mitigate volatility risks in their portfolios. We propose a measure of the relative value of a delta-Symmetric Strangle and compute it under the standard Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model. This new measure accounts for the price of the strangle, relative to the Present Value of the spread between the two strikes, all expressed, after a natural re-parameterization, in terms of delta and a volatility parameter. We show that under the standard BSM model, this measure of relative value is bounded by a simple function of delta only and is independent of the time to expiry, the price of the underlying security or the prevailing volatility used in the pricing model. We demonstrate how this bound can be used as a quick benchmark to assess, regardless the market volatility, the duration of the contract or the price of the underlying security, the market (relative) value of the strangle in comparison to its BSM (relative) price. In fact, the explicit and simple expression for this measure and bound allows us to also study in detail the strangle’s exit strategy and the corresponding optimal choice for a value of delta.

Suggested Citation

  • Ben Boukai, 2020. "How Much Is Your Strangle Worth? On the Relative Value of the Strangle under the Black-Scholes Pricing Model," Applied Economics and Finance, Redfame publishing, vol. 7(4), pages 138-146, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:rfa:aefjnl:v:7:y:2020:i:4:p:138-146
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/download/4887/5089
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: http://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/view/4887
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert C. Merton, 2005. "Theory of rational option pricing," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Sudipto Bhattacharya & George M Constantinides (ed.), Theory Of Valuation, chapter 8, pages 229-288, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    2. Wilmott,Paul & Howison,Sam & Dewynne,Jeff, 1995. "The Mathematics of Financial Derivatives," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521497893.
    3. Black, Fischer & Scholes, Myron S, 1973. "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 637-654, May-June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ben Boukai, 2021. "The Generalized Gamma distribution as a useful RND under Heston's stochastic volatility model," Papers 2108.07937, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2021.
    2. Benzion Boukai, 2022. "The Generalized Gamma Distribution as a Useful RND under Heston’s Stochastic Volatility Model," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 15(6), pages 1-18, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Otto Konstandatos & Timothy J Kyng, 2012. "Real Options Analysis for Commodity Based Mining Enterprises with Compound and Barrier Features," Published Paper Series 2012-3, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    2. Hitoshi Imai & Naoyuki Ishimura & Ikumi Mottate & Masaaki Nakamura, 2006. "On the Hoggard–Whalley–Wilmott Equation for the Pricing of Options with Transaction Costs," Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Springer;Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering, vol. 13(4), pages 315-326, December.
    3. Khaliq, A.Q.M. & Voss, D.A. & Kazmi, S.H.K., 2006. "A linearly implicit predictor-corrector scheme for pricing American options using a penalty method approach," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 489-502, February.
    4. Michael A. Kouritzin, 2016. "Explicit Heston Solutions and Stochastic Approximation for Path-dependent Option Pricing," Papers 1608.02028, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2018.
    5. Ziwei Ke & Joanna Goard, 2019. "Penalty American Options," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 22(02), pages 1-32, March.
    6. Tomas Bokes, 2010. "A unified approach to determining the early exercise boundary position at expiry for American style of general class of derivatives," Papers 1012.0348, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2011.
    7. Schachter, J.A. & Mancarella, P., 2016. "A critical review of Real Options thinking for valuing investment flexibility in Smart Grids and low carbon energy systems," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 261-271.
    8. Deswal, Komal & Kumar, Devendra, 2022. "Rannacher time-marching with orthogonal spline collocation method for retrieving the discontinuous behavior of hedging parameters," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 427(C).
    9. Ömür Ugur, 2008. "An Introduction to Computational Finance," World Scientific Books, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., number p556, February.
    10. Michael A. Kouritzin, 2018. "Explicit Heston Solutions And Stochastic Approximation For Path-Dependent Option Pricing," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 21(01), pages 1-45, February.
    11. Endah R. M. Putri & Lutfi Mardianto & Amirul Hakam & Chairul Imron & Hadi Susanto, 2021. "Removing non-smoothness in solving Black-Scholes equation using a perturbation method," Papers 2104.07839, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2021.
    12. Zhongkai Liu & Tao Pang, 2016. "An efficient grid lattice algorithm for pricing American-style options," International Journal of Financial Markets and Derivatives, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 5(1), pages 36-55.
    13. Mario Gutiérrez Lagunes, 2010. "La sectorización económica y su vinculación con la probabilidad de incumplimiento," Revista de Administración, Finanzas y Economía (Journal of Management, Finance and Economics), Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México, vol. 4(2), pages 93-110.
    14. Song-Ping Zhu, 2006. "An exact and explicit solution for the valuation of American put options," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(3), pages 229-242.
    15. Naoyuki Ishimura, 2010. "Remarks on the Nonlinear Black-Scholes Equations with the Effect of Transaction Costs," Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Springer;Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering, vol. 17(3), pages 241-259, September.
    16. Alex Garivaltis, 2022. "Rational pricing of leveraged ETF expense ratios," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 18(3), pages 393-418, September.
    17. Luke Miller & Mark Bertus, 2013. "An Exposition On The Mathematics And Economics Of Option Pricing," Business Education and Accreditation, The Institute for Business and Finance Research, vol. 5(1), pages 1-16.
    18. Jung-Kyung Lee, 2020. "On a Free Boundary Problem for American Options Under the Generalized Black–Scholes Model," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(9), pages 1-11, September.
    19. Wujiang Lou, 2015. "Extending the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Theory to Account for an Option Market Maker's Funding Costs," Papers 1510.04370, arXiv.org.
    20. Yepes Rodri­guez, Ramón, 2008. "Real option valuation of free destination in long-term liquefied natural gas supplies," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 1909-1932, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • R00 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General - - - General
    • Z0 - Other Special Topics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rfa:aefjnl:v:7:y:2020:i:4:p:138-146. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Redfame publishing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cepflch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.