Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2018/iii/paper-202/4/i/solution

Use the standard definition of a local martingale, including an integrable initial value, and let be a localizing sequence. If , the Fatou lemma gives . For , the Conditional Fatou lemma gives
For clarity, the Conditional Fatou lemma itself follows by setting for nonnegative , applying the conditional version of the monotone convergence theorem to , and observing . Hence a nonnegative local martingale is a supermartingale.
If simultaneously for all , with a deterministic , the dominated convergence theorem applied to the stopped martingale identity gives, for each ,
This is exactly the conditional expectation identity, so a bounded local martingale is a true martingale. The same proof works for deterministic bounds on every finite time interval; merely having a finite random pathwise bound supplies no dominating integrable random variable and is a different convention.

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