Category: Level II

  • Straddle

    If you haven’t read the article on option strategies in general, that’s a good place to start, then return here. In particular, if you haven’t read the warning about calculating profit that appears at the end of that article, you should go read it now; the way I’m calculating the profit here is correct, but…

  • (Equity) Collar

    If you haven’t read the article on option strategies in general, that’s a good place to start, then return here. In particular, if you haven’t read the warning about calculating profit that appears at the end of that article, you should go read it now; the way I’m calculating the profit here is correct, but…

  • Butterfly Spread

    If you haven’t read the article on option strategies in general, that’s a good place to start, then return here. In particular, if you haven’t read the warning about calculating profit that appears at the end of that article, you should go read it now; the way I’m calculating the profit here is correct, but…

  • Bull Spread

    If you haven’t read the article on option strategies in general, that’s a good place to start, then return here. In particular, if you haven’t read the warning about calculating profit that appears at the end of that article, you should go read it now; the way I’m calculating the profit here is correct, but…

  • Interest Rate Caps and Floors

    Interest rate caps and floors are, essentially, collections of interest rate options: each option has a positive payoff when it expires in the money and a zero payoff when it expires out of the money.  The individual options are called, respectively, caplets and floorlets. Note that caps and floors are commonly based on LIBOR or…

  • Present Value of Growth Opportunities (PVGO)

    Most companies don’t remain the same size (i.e., have the same amount of earnings, net income) forever; with a soupçon of luck, a company’s earnings will grow, year after year.  The value of a company’s opportunities to grow in the future is known, with no great originality, as the present value of growth opportunities (PVGO). …

  • Binomial Pricing Trees (for Options)

    Binomial trees are used in a variety of contexts in finance: Calculating probabilities for Bayes’ Formula type problems Calculating the value of options on stocks, commodities, and so on (you are here) Calculating the option-adjusted spread (OAS) for bonds Calculating the value of bonds with embedded options Calculating the value of floating-rate bonds Calculating the…

  • Valuing Bonds with Embedded Options

    Bonds can be sold with a variety of embedded options, for example: Call options Put options Prepayment options Conversion options In this article, we will concentrate on callable bonds and putable bonds, although we’ll mention prepayable and convertible bonds as well. The common method of valuing a callable or putable bond is to use a…

  • Valuing Floating-Rate Bonds

    Some floating-rate bonds are easy to value: if the coupon resets to the market rate, then the value of the bond will reset to par.  (Of course, this assumes that by “the market rate” we mean the rate appropriate for a given bond, which may have to include risk premia above the Treasury rate.  If…

  • Option-Adjusted Spread (OAS)

    Option-adjusted spread (OAS) is a yield spread (i.e., an interest rate) that is added to the (1-period forward) interest rate at each node in a binomial tree; specifically, it is the spread that when added to the discount rates results in the tree giving the current market price for a particular bond, after accounting for…