A drawdown constraint forces the current wealth to remain above a given
function of its maximum to date. We consider the portfolio optimisation problem
of maximising the long-term growth rate of the expected utility of wealth
subject to a drawdown constraint, as in the original setup of Grossman and Zhou
(1993). We work in an abstract semimartingale financial market model with a
general class of utility functions and drawdown constraints. We solve the
problem by showing that it is in fact equivalent to an unconstrained problem
but for a modified utility function.
We pursue an inverse approach to utility theory and consumption & investment
problems. Instead of specifying an agent's utility function and deriving her
actions, we assume we observe her actions (i.e. her consumption and investment
strategies) and ask if it is possible to derive a utility function for which
the observed behaviour is optimal. We work in continuous time both in a
deterministic and stochastic setting. In a deterministic setup, we find that
there are infinitely many utility functions generating a given consumption
pattern.
Consider a frictionless market trading a finite number of co-maturing
European call and put options written on a risky asset plus an instrument with
path-dependent payoff known as a weighted variance swap, e.g. a vanilla
variance swap or a corridor variance swap. The question we ask is: Do the
traded prices admit an arbitrage opportunity? We determine necessary and
sufficient model-free conditions for the price of a continuously monitored
weighted variance swap to be consistent with absence of arbitrage.
We study the class of Azema-Yor processes defined from a general
semimartingale with a continuous running supremum process. We show that they
arise as unique strong solutions of the Bachelier stochastic differential
equation which we prove is equivalent to the Drawdown equation. Solutions of
the latter have the drawdown property: they always stay above a given function
of their past supremum. We then show that any process which satisfies the
drawdown property is in fact an Azema-Yor process.