Portfolio insurance using traded options

Abstract

Literature concerning the institutional use of options indicates that the main purpose of option trading is to provide investors with the opportunity to create return distributions previously unavailable, considering that options provide the means to manipulate portfolio returns. In such a context, this study intends to analyse the returns of insured portfolios generated by hedging strategies on underlying stock portfolios. Because dynamic hedging is too expensive, we have hedged the stock positions discretely, in a way that the positions were revised only when the daily hedge ratio has changed more than a specific amount. The results, provided by these hedging schemes, indicate that a small rise of the standard deviation seems to be largely compensated with the higher average returns. In fact, such strategies seem to be highly influenced by the price movements of underlying stocks, requiring more frequent (sparse) adjustments in periods of high (low) volatility. Thus, discrete hedging strategies seem more accurate and meaningful than the arbitrary regular intervals largely presented and discussed in literature.

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