Put and define the nonnegative reserve rate . The obstacle problem gives and . The American-option superhedge with a funded reserve invests the local surplus in the bond rather than consuming it.
For initial wealth , set
and choose the stock and bond holdings
Thus and , pathwise at every time. The Itô formula under the original drift gives
Adding these equations yields
This is a self-financing strategy, and its nonnegative wealth makes it an admissible trading strategy. Continuity of the stock and local regularity of ensure local integrability of the holdings. The construction does not require .
For a classical solution, the usual Itô formula applies directly. The smooth fit solution below is and piecewise , with locally absolutely continuous first derivative. The generalized Itô formula applies with its almost-everywhere second derivative; the absence of a derivative jump means no boundary local time of a semimartingale term. This is the usual regularity interpretation of the perpetual American option obstacle equation.
Normalize and put . Its dynamics are . Bounded volatility makes this stochastic exponential a true martingale on each finite horizon, by the Novikov condition. It also gives a finite second moment: stopping the Itô formula for and applying the Gronwall inequality yields when .
The discounted payoff is thus square-integrable. Define the nonnegative martingale
The Brownian martingale representation theorem says that every square-integrable martingale in the Brownian filtration has a representation with predictable and . Since and , choose
Then discounted gains satisfy . Consequently is self-financing, nonnegative, and hence an admissible trading strategy. At maturity , proving claim replication at cost .
For minimality, discounted wealth of any admissible self-financing portfolio is a local martingale bounded below, hence a supermartingale by localization and the conditional Fatou lemma. Thus any such replication with initial wealth obeys
Together with the constructed portfolio, this proves
This is Brownian representation replication in a local volatility market. The given drift means that the original probability measure already serves as the risk-neutral measure.