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.
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.
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 gives
Adding 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 is
The 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.
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.