IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1704.06697.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pairs Trading under Drift Uncertainty and Risk Penalization

Author

Listed:
  • Suhan Altay
  • Katia Colaneri
  • Zehra Eksi

Abstract

In this work, we study a dynamic portfolio optimization problem related to pairs trading, which is an investment strategy that matches a long position in one security with a short position in another security with similar characteristics. The relationship between pairs, called a spread, is modeled by a Gaussian mean-reverting process whose drift rate is modulated by an unobservable continuous-time, finite-state Markov chain. Using the classical stochastic filtering theory, we reduce this problem with partial information to the one with full information and solve it for the logarithmic utility function, where the terminal wealth is penalized by the riskiness of the portfolio according to the realized volatility of the wealth process. We characterize optimal dollar-neutral strategies as well as optimal value functions under full and partial information and show that the certainty equivalence principle holds for the optimal portfolio strategy. Finally, we provide a numerical analysis for a toy example with a two-state Markov chain.

Suggested Citation

  • Suhan Altay & Katia Colaneri & Zehra Eksi, 2017. "Pairs Trading under Drift Uncertainty and Risk Penalization," Papers 1704.06697, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2018.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1704.06697
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.06697
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert Elliott & John Van Der Hoek & William Malcolm, 2005. "Pairs trading," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 5(3), pages 271-276.
    2. Rüdiger Frey & Abdelali Gabih & Ralf Wunderlich, 2012. "Portfolio Optimization Under Partial Information With Expert Opinions," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 15(01), pages 1-18.
    3. Lei, Yaoting & Xu, Jing, 2015. "Costly arbitrage through pairs trading," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1-19.
    4. Tourin, Agnès & Yan, Raphael, 2013. "Dynamic pairs trading using the stochastic control approach," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(10), pages 1972-1981.
    5. Duan, Jin-Chuan & Pliska, Stanley R., 2004. "Option valuation with co-integrated asset prices," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 28(4), pages 727-754, January.
    6. Tomas Björk & Mark Davis & Camilla Landén, 2010. "Optimal investment under partial information," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 71(2), pages 371-399, April.
    7. Evan Gatev & William N. Goetzmann & K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 2006. "Pairs Trading: Performance of a Relative-Value Arbitrage Rule," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 19(3), pages 797-827.
    8. Hogan, Steve & Jarrow, Robert & Teo, Melvyn & Warachka, Mitch, 2004. "Testing market efficiency using statistical arbitrage with applications to momentum and value strategies," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(3), pages 525-565, September.
    9. Álvaro Cartea & Sebastian Jaimungal, 2016. "Algorithmic Trading Of Co-Integrated Assets," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 19(06), pages 1-18, September.
    10. Sangmin Lee & Andrew Papanicolaou, 2016. "Pairs Trading Of Two Assets With Uncertainty In Co-Integration'S Level Of Mean Reversion," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 19(08), pages 1-36, December.
    11. Zhengqin Zeng & Chi-Guhn Lee, 2014. "Pairs trading: optimal thresholds and profitability," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(11), pages 1881-1893, November.
    12. Christopher Krauss, 2017. "Statistical Arbitrage Pairs Trading Strategies: Review And Outlook," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(2), pages 513-545, April.
    13. L C G Rogers & Pawel Zaczkowski, 2013. "Monte Carlo approximation to optimal investment," Papers 1305.3433, arXiv.org.
    14. Tim Leung & Xin Li, 2015. "Optimal Mean Reversion Trading With Transaction Costs And Stop-Loss Exit," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 18(03), pages 1-31.
    15. Luz Rocío Sotomayor & Abel Cadenillas, 2009. "Explicit Solutions Of Consumption‐Investment Problems In Financial Markets With Regime Switching," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 19(2), pages 251-279, April.
    16. Gourieroux, Christian & Jasiak, Joann, 2006. "Multivariate Jacobi process with application to smooth transitions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 131(1-2), pages 475-505.
    17. Rüdiger Frey & Abdelali Gabih & Ralf Wunderlich, 2012. "Portfolio Optimization Under Partial Information With Expert Opinions," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Matheus R Grasselli & Lane P Hughston (ed.), Finance at Fields, chapter 11, pages 265-282, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Katia Colaneri & Alessandra Cretarola & Benedetta Salterini, 2021. "Optimal Investment and Proportional Reinsurance in a Regime-Switching Market Model under Forward Preferences," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(14), pages 1-27, July.
    2. E. Boguslavskaya & M. Boguslavsky & D. Muravey, 2020. "Trading multiple mean reversion," Papers 2009.09816, arXiv.org.
    3. Flavio Angelini & Katia Colaneri & Stefano Herzel & Marco Nicolosi, 2021. "Implicit incentives for fund managers with partial information," Computational Management Science, Springer, vol. 18(4), pages 539-561, October.
    4. Alessandra Cretarola & Benedetta Salterini, 2023. "Utility-based indifference pricing of pure endowments in a Markov-modulated market model," Papers 2301.13575, arXiv.org.
    5. Bandini, Elena & Calvia, Alessandro & Colaneri, Katia, 2022. "Stochastic filtering of a pure jump process with predictable jumps and path-dependent local characteristics," Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 396-435.
    6. Sühan Altay & Katia Colaneri & Zehra Eksi, 2021. "Optimal convergence trading with unobservable pricing errors," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 133-161, April.
    7. Suhan Altay & Katia Colaneri & Zehra Eksi, 2019. "Optimal Convergence Trading with Unobservable Pricing Errors," Papers 1910.01438, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2019.
    8. Katia Colaneri & Stefano Herzel & Marco Nicolosi, 2021. "The value of knowing the market price of risk," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 101-131, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sühan Altay & Katia Colaneri & Zehra Eksi, 2018. "Pairs Trading Under Drift Uncertainty And Risk Penalization," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 21(07), pages 1-24, November.
    2. Sühan Altay & Katia Colaneri & Zehra Eksi, 2021. "Optimal convergence trading with unobservable pricing errors," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 133-161, April.
    3. Suhan Altay & Katia Colaneri & Zehra Eksi, 2019. "Optimal Convergence Trading with Unobservable Pricing Errors," Papers 1910.01438, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2019.
    4. Zequn Li & Agnès Tourin, 2022. "A Finite Difference Scheme for Pairs Trading with Transaction Costs," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 60(2), pages 601-632, August.
    5. Katia Colaneri & Stefano Herzel & Marco Nicolosi, 2021. "The value of knowing the market price of risk," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 101-131, April.
    6. Thomas Nanfeng Li & Agnès Tourin, 2016. "Optimal pairs trading with time-varying volatility," International Journal of Financial Engineering (IJFE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 3(03), pages 1-29, September.
    7. Haipeng Xing, 2019. "A singular stochastic control approach for optimal pairs trading with proportional transaction costs," Papers 1911.10450, arXiv.org.
    8. Stübinger, Johannes & Endres, Sylvia, 2017. "Pairs trading with a mean-reverting jump-diffusion model on high-frequency data," FAU Discussion Papers in Economics 10/2017, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute for Economics.
    9. Krauss, Christopher, 2015. "Statistical arbitrage pairs trading strategies: Review and outlook," FAU Discussion Papers in Economics 09/2015, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute for Economics.
    10. Fernando Caneo & Werner Kristjanpoller, 2021. "Improving statistical arbitrage investment strategy: Evidence from Latin American stock markets," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(3), pages 4424-4440, July.
    11. Álvaro Cartea & Sebastian Jaimungal, 2016. "Algorithmic Trading Of Co-Integrated Assets," International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance (IJTAF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 19(06), pages 1-18, September.
    12. T. N. Li & A. Papanicolaou, 2019. "Statistical Arbitrage for Multiple Co-Integrated Stocks," Papers 1908.02164, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2022.
    13. Endres, Sylvia & Stübinger, Johannes, 2017. "Optimal trading strategies for Lévy-driven Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes," FAU Discussion Papers in Economics 17/2017, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute for Economics.
    14. Yerkin Kitapbayev & Tim Leung, 2017. "Optimal mean-reverting spread trading: nonlinear integral equation approach," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 13(2), pages 181-203, May.
    15. Zehra Eksi & Hyejin Ku, 2017. "Portfolio optimization for a large investor under partial information and price impact," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 86(3), pages 601-623, December.
    16. Tim Leung & Raphael Yan, 2018. "Optimal dynamic pairs trading of futures under a two-factor mean-reverting model," International Journal of Financial Engineering (IJFE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 5(03), pages 1-23, September.
    17. P. S. Lintilhac & A. Tourin, 2017. "Model-based pairs trading in the bitcoin markets," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(5), pages 703-716, May.
    18. Danni Chen & Jing Cui & Yan Gao & Leilei Wu, 2017. "Pairs trading in Chinese commodity futures markets: an adaptive cointegration approach," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 57(5), pages 1237-1264, December.
    19. Johannes Stübinger & Lucas Schneider, 2019. "Statistical Arbitrage with Mean-Reverting Overnight Price Gaps on High-Frequency Data of the S&P 500," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 12(2), pages 1-19, April.
    20. Abdelali Gabih & Hakam Kondakji & Ralf Wunderlich, 2024. "Power utility maximization with expert opinions at fixed arrival times in a market with hidden Gaussian drift," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 341(2), pages 897-936, October.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1704.06697. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.