Hedging Options with Scale-Invariant Models

A price process is scale-invariant if and only if the returns distribution is independent of the price level. We show that scale invariance preserves the homogeneity of a pay-off function throughout the life of the claim and hence prove that standard price hedge ratios for a wide class of contingent claims are model-free. Since options on traded assets are normally priced using some form of scale-invariant process, e.g. a stochastic volatility, jump diffusion or Lévy process, this result has important implications for the hedging literature. However, standard price hedge ratios are not always the optimal hedge ratios to use in a delta or delta-gamma hedge strategy; in fact we recommend the use of minimum variance hedge ratios for scale-invariant models. Our theoretical results are supported by an empirical study that compares the hedging performance of various smile-consistent scale-invariant and non-scale-invariant models. We find no significant difference between the minimum variance hedges in the smile-consistent models but a significant improvement upon the standard, model-free hedge ratios