Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 40 3 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
A complete market permits claim replication for every finite maturity and every bounded claim measurable at that maturity: there are an initial capital and a predictable self-financing portfolio whose terminal wealth equals the claim almost surely. In a finite-state market this is equivalent to replicating every terminal payoff, since all such payoffs are bounded. Trading is allowed dynamically in the existing assets; adding a new security is not part of the definition.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 40 6 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
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 martingaleThe Brownian martingale representation theorem says that every square-integrable martingale in the Brownian filtration has a representation with predictable and . Since and , chooseThen 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 obeysTogether with the constructed portfolio, this provesThis 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.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 211 3 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Let be the stock holding and let be the initial cost, so the cash holding is . Terminal portfolio wealth at stock price is . Dominating the European call option payoff at the three possible prices givesAdding the two endpoint inequalities yields . Equality is attained by and , which imply . The corresponding terminal wealth is at , respectively, compared with the required payoff . The cheapest super-replication strategy isThe middle-state excess shows why this is superhedging rather than exact claim replication. The endpoint bound proves global minimality, without relying on the physical state probabilities.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 211 4 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
A complete market can replicate every contingent claim in its specified payoff class: for every terminal -measurable payoff , there is an admissible self-financing portfolio whose terminal wealth equals almost surely. Equivalently, in an arbitrage-free finite-state discrete-time model the equivalent martingale measure is unique. In notation,Market completeness is a replication property. The following price comparisons also use the usual absence of arbitrage, which the source leaves implicit: without it the initial cost of claim replication need not be unique. For example, in a deterministic one-period model with cash worth one at both dates and a stock worth one initially but zero finally, all terminal claims are replicable using cash. Adding any stock holding changes the initial cost without changing the terminal payoff. This is a complete model with arbitrage, so it has no well-defined unique replication price.
Superhedging 2026-10-06
An admissible self-financing portfolio superhedges a contingent claim when its terminal wealth is at least the claim payoff almost surely. The least permitted initial cost is the superhedging price. Exact claim replication requires equality.