Law of one price

The law of one price requires traded assets or portfolios with the same terminal payoff to have the same earlier price. In a model where every discounted traded price is a true martingale under a common equivalent measure, it follows by taking the conditional expectation of that terminal payoff. With only local martingale prices and a lower-bound restriction on admissible trading strategies, it can fail: the seemingly profitable short position may have unbounded possible losses before maturity.

Fix $T>0$, let $X$ be Brownian motion, and let $\tau =\inf \{u:X_u=-1\}$. Set $q(t)=t/(T-t)$ for $t<T$ andThe hitting time is finite almost surely, so each price path reaches one before $T$ and stays there. Stopping additionally on hitting $n+2$ makes the stock price a bounded martingale; these stopping times increase to $T$. Hence $S$ is a positive local martingale, and the original probability measure is an equivalent local martingale measure, excluding admissible arbitrage. Nevertheless $S_T=B_T$ while $S_0=2\ne 1=B_0$. The zero-cost short-stock/long-two-cash portfolio has terminal gain one but wealth $2-S_t$, which has no deterministic lower bound. It is not admissible, resolving the apparent contradiction.