Extracting the risk-neutral density from call prices
Question
Suppose you observe prices of European calls with a fixed expiry for every strike . Show how to recover the risk-neutral probability density of the stock price at .
Short answer
. Since , one derivative in gives and a second gives (Breeden-Litzenberger). In practice this is a butterfly spread divided by the squared strike spacing.
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 6.2 The Greeks, 'Vega C', p.157; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Reading the Implied Vol Surface — Moneyness, Term Structure, and Quoting Conventions
- Continuous Random Variables and Probability Density Functions
- Cumulative Distribution Functions
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