Choosing between annual and daily volatility for hedging
Question
A stock's returns mean-revert. Measured on annual returns its volatility is , but measured on daily returns (and then annualised) it is . You have sold a European option and will delta-hedge it daily. Which volatility should you use?
Short answer
, the daily volatility. Hedging P&L comes from gamma times the realised squared moves between rebalances, so what you pay for is the volatility of the small moves you actually hedge through. Mean reversion makes long-horizon variance smaller, but that does not reduce the cost of daily re-hedging.
Adapted from Joshi, Denson & Downes, Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers, Q2.41, p.20; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Mean-Reverting Diffusions: OU, Vasicek, CIR, and the Feller Condition
- Populations, Samples, and Sampling Distributions
- Derivation — From Binomial Trees to Black-Scholes in the Continuous Limit
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