Value of a one-dollar touch claim at a higher barrier
Question
A stock currently trades at $1 and follows geometric Brownian motion; the risk-free rate is zero. A perpetual contract pays $1 at the first moment the stock price hits a level (and nothing if it never does). What is the contract worth today?
Short answer
. With the stock is a martingale under the risk-neutral measure. Stopping it at the hitting time of (it cannot go negative, so optional stopping applies) gives , hence the hit probability, and the claim's value, is . Equivalently, holding shares replicates it.
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 6.1 Option Pricing, 'Black-Scholes formula D', p.146; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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