11

OPTIONS – VOLATILITY AND THE GREEKS

11.1 Volatility

11.2 Volatility smiles and skews

11.3 The VIX

11.4 Value profiles prior to maturity

11.5 How options behave – the Greeks

11.6 Delta hedging

This chapter starts with an extensive discussion of volatility, introduced in the previous chapter, and an essential ingredient for pricing options. Later we will introduce the ‘Greeks’, most of which measure how sensitive the option premium is to changes in the pricing variables. Finally we look at the way in which banks use delta hedging to manage their option books, and show how the costs of so doing compare with the premiums they receive.

11.1 Volatility

No matter which model we use, whether a closed-form model like Black–Scholes, a binomial ...

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