Use the discounted wealth and the discounted dividend gains
The integral uses : the printed inside an integral indexed by is a differential typo. Since is a positive finite-variation process, the Itô product rule gives
The bank-account terms cancel using .
If is a -martingale, discounted self-financing wealth is a -local martingale. The admissible trading strategy lower bound makes it a supermartingale, exactly as in the previous no-arbitrage proof. A zero-cost portfolio with nonnegative terminal wealth must therefore have terminal wealth zero -almost surely and, by equivalence, physically almost surely. Hence an equivalent martingale measure for discounted dividend gains excludes arbitrage. It is the gains process, not just the ex-dividend price ratio, that must have zero martingale drift.
Risk-neutral measure 2026-10-14
A risk-neutral measure is a probability measure equivalent to the physical probability measure , meaning they agree on which events have zero probability. For assets without intermediate payments, prices expressed in the chosen numéraire must be martingales under . For a positive bank account and a stock without dividends, this requires to be a martingale; with dividends, use discounted dividend gains. In an unrestricted finite-state one-period financial market, existence of such a measure is equivalent to absence of arbitrage, by the fundamental theorem of asset pricing.
Physical probability describes the modeled frequency or belief about an up move. The risk-neutral probability is constrained by traded prices. In the worked binomial market, even if or . Calling risk-neutral does not assume that investors have no risk aversion; it changes the weights used for risk-neutral pricing.