DEFAULTABLE TERM STRUCTURES DRIVEN BY SEMIMARTINGALES

In this paper, we consider a market with a term structure of credit risky bonds in the single-name case. We aim at minimal assumptions extending existing results in this direction: first, the random field of forward rates is driven by a general semimartingale. Second, the Heath–Jarrow–Morton (HJM) approach is extended with an additional component capturing those future jumps in the term structure which are visible from the current time. Third, the associated recovery scheme is as general as possible, it is only assumed to be nonincreasing. In this general setting, we derive generalized drift conditions which characterize when a given measure is a local martingale measure, thus yielding no asymptotic free lunch with vanishing risk (NAFLVR), the right notion for this large financial market to be free of arbitrage.

CRITICAL TRANSACTION COSTS AND 1-STEP ASYMPTOTIC ARBITRAGE IN FRACTIONAL BINARY MARKETS

We study the arbitrage opportunities in the presence of transaction costs in a sequence of binary markets approximating the fractional Black–Scholes model. This approximating sequence was constructed by Sottinen and named fractional binary markets. Since, in the frictionless case, these markets admit arbitrage, we aim to determine the size of the transaction costs needed to eliminate the arbitrage from these models. To gain more insight, we first consider only 1-step trading strategies and we prove that arbitrage opportunities appear when the transaction costs are of order [Formula: see text]. Next, we characterize the asymptotic behavior of the smallest transaction costs [Formula: see text], called "critical" transaction costs, starting from which the arbitrage disappears. Since the fractional Black–Scholes model is arbitrage-free under arbitrarily small transaction costs, one could expect that [Formula: see text] converges to zero. However, the true behavior of [Formula: see text] is opposed to this intuition. More precisely, we show, with the help of a new family of trading strategies, that [Formula: see text] converges to one. We explain this apparent contradiction and conclude that it is appropriate to see the fractional binary markets as a large financial market and to study its asymptotic arbitrage opportunities. Finally, we construct a 1-step asymptotic arbitrage in this large market when the transaction costs are of order o(1/NH), whereas for constant transaction costs, we prove that no such opportunity exists.