Leveraged Exchange-traded Funds ― Price Dynamics and Options Valuation

This Brief provides an analysis, under both discrete-time and continuous-time frameworks, on the price dynamics of leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs), with emphasis on the roles of leverage ratio, realized volatility, investment horizon, and tracking errors. This study provides new insights on the risks associated with LETFs, and leads to the discussion of trading strategies, including pairs trading and stop-loss strategies, with mathematical justification and formulas, along with a host of examples using empirical data. The final part of the Brief addresses the pricing of options written on LETFs. Since different LETFs are designed to track the same reference index, these funds and their associated options share very similar sources of randomness. The authors provide a no-arbitrage pricing approach that consistently value options on LETFs with different leverage ratios with stochastic volatility and jumps in the reference index. Their results are useful for market making of these options, and for identifying price discrepancies across the LETF options markets.

Tim Leung?is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) Department. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Financial Engineering, and Data Sciences Institute at Columbia. He received a PhD in Operations Research & Financial Engineering (ORFE) from Princeton University. Dr. Leung's research areas are Financial Engineering and Optimal Stochastic Control, with a focus on the valuation of financial derivatives, and associated risk management and trading strategies. He has written extensively on exchange-traded funds (ETFs). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). He has published in various Financial Mathematics journals, including?Mathematical Finance, Finance and Stochastics, SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics, and Quantitative Finance. He is also an officer of the SIAM SIAG on Financial Mathematics and Engineering, and the INFORMS Finance Section.