Correlation swap

Last updated

A correlation swap is an over-the-counter financial derivative that allows one to speculate on or hedge risks associated with the observed average correlation, of a collection of underlying products, where each product has periodically observable prices, as with a commodity, exchange rate, interest rate, or stock index.

Contents

Payoff Definition

The fixed leg of a correlation swap pays the notional times the agreed strike , while the floating leg pays the realized correlation . The contract value at expiration from the pay-fixed perspective is therefore

Given a set of nonnegative weights on securities, the realized correlation is defined as the weighted average of all pairwise correlation coefficients :

Typically would be calculated as the Pearson correlation coefficient between the daily log-returns of assets i and j, possibly under zero-mean assumption.

Most correlation swaps trade using equal weights, in which case the realized correlation formula simplifies to:

The specificity of correlation swaps is somewhat counterintuitive, as the protection buyer pays the fixed, unlike in usual swaps.

Pricing and valuation

No industry-standard models yet exist that have stochastic correlation and are arbitrage-free.

See also

Sources

Related Research Articles

In complex analysis, an entire function, also called an integral function, is a complex-valued function that is holomorphic on the whole complex plane. Typical examples of entire functions are polynomials and the exponential function, and any finite sums, products and compositions of these, such as the trigonometric functions sine and cosine and their hyperbolic counterparts sinh and cosh, as well as derivatives and integrals of entire functions such as the error function. If an entire function has a root at , then , taking the limit value at , is an entire function. On the other hand, the natural logarithm, the reciprocal function, and the square root are all not entire functions, nor can they be continued analytically to an entire function.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Correlation</span> Statistical concept

In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics it usually refers to the degree to which a pair of variables are linearly related. Familiar examples of dependent phenomena include the correlation between the height of parents and their offspring, and the correlation between the price of a good and the quantity the consumers are willing to purchase, as it is depicted in the so-called demand curve.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pearson correlation coefficient</span> Measure of linear correlation

In statistics, the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) is a correlation coefficient that measures linear correlation between two sets of data. It is the ratio between the covariance of two variables and the product of their standard deviations; thus, it is essentially a normalized measurement of the covariance, such that the result always has a value between −1 and 1. As with covariance itself, the measure can only reflect a linear correlation of variables, and ignores many other types of relationships or correlations. As a simple example, one would expect the age and height of a sample of teenagers from a high school to have a Pearson correlation coefficient significantly greater than 0, but less than 1.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spearman's rank correlation coefficient</span> Nonparametric measure of rank correlation

In statistics, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient or Spearman's ρ, named after Charles Spearman and often denoted by the Greek letter (rho) or as , is a nonparametric measure of rank correlation. It assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function.

Molar concentration (also called molarity, amount concentration or substance concentration) is a measure of the concentration of a chemical species, in particular, of a solute in a solution, in terms of amount of substance per unit volume of solution. In chemistry, the most commonly used unit for molarity is the number of moles per liter, having the unit symbol mol/L or mol/dm3 in SI units. A solution with a concentration of 1 mol/L is said to be 1 molar, commonly designated as 1 M or 1 M. Molarity is often depicted with square brackets around the substance of interest; for example, the molarity of the hydrogen ion is depicted as [H+].

Modern portfolio theory (MPT), or mean-variance analysis, is a mathematical framework for assembling a portfolio of assets such that the expected return is maximized for a given level of risk. It is a formalization and extension of diversification in investing, the idea that owning different kinds of financial assets is less risky than owning only one type. Its key insight is that an asset's risk and return should not be assessed by itself, but by how it contributes to a portfolio's overall risk and return. It uses the past variance of asset prices as a proxy for future risk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fisher transformation</span> Statistical transformation

In statistics, the Fisher transformation of a Pearson correlation coefficient is its inverse hyperbolic tangent (artanh). When the sample correlation coefficient r is near 1 or -1, its distribution is highly skewed, which makes it difficult to estimate confidence intervals and apply tests of significance for the population correlation coefficient ρ. The Fisher transformation solves this problem by yielding a variable whose distribution is approximately normally distributed, with a variance that is stable over different values of r.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yule–Simon distribution</span> Discrete probability distribution

In probability and statistics, the Yule–Simon distribution is a discrete probability distribution named after Udny Yule and Herbert A. Simon. Simon originally called it the Yule distribution.

A variance swap is an over-the-counter financial derivative that allows one to speculate on or hedge risks associated with the magnitude of movement, i.e. volatility, of some underlying product, like an exchange rate, interest rate, or stock index.

In theoretical physics and mathematics, a Wess–Zumino–Witten (WZW) model, also called a Wess–Zumino–Novikov–Witten model, is a type of two-dimensional conformal field theory named after Julius Wess, Bruno Zumino, Sergei Novikov and Edward Witten. A WZW model is associated to a Lie group, and its symmetry algebra is the affine Lie algebra built from the corresponding Lie algebra. By extension, the name WZW model is sometimes used for any conformal field theory whose symmetry algebra is an affine Lie algebra.

The control variates method is a variance reduction technique used in Monte Carlo methods. It exploits information about the errors in estimates of known quantities to reduce the error of an estimate of an unknown quantity.

In statistics, a rank correlation is any of several statistics that measure an ordinal association—the relationship between rankings of different ordinal variables or different rankings of the same variable, where a "ranking" is the assignment of the ordering labels "first", "second", "third", etc. to different observations of a particular variable. A rank correlation coefficient measures the degree of similarity between two rankings, and can be used to assess the significance of the relation between them. For example, two common nonparametric methods of significance that use rank correlation are the Mann–Whitney U test and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reciprocity (network science)</span>

In network science, reciprocity is a measure of the likelihood of vertices in a directed network to be mutually linked. Like the clustering coefficient, scale-free degree distribution, or community structure, reciprocity is a quantitative measure used to study complex networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Assortativity</span> Tendency for similar nodes to be connected

Assortativity, or assortative mixing, is a preference for a network's nodes to attach to others that are similar in some way. Though the specific measure of similarity may vary, network theorists often examine assortativity in terms of a node's degree. The addition of this characteristic to network models more closely approximates the behaviors of many real world networks.

In probability theory and statistics, partial correlation measures the degree of association between two random variables, with the effect of a set of controlling random variables removed. When determining the numerical relationship between two variables of interest, using their correlation coefficient will give misleading results if there is another confounding variable that is numerically related to both variables of interest. This misleading information can be avoided by controlling for the confounding variable, which is done by computing the partial correlation coefficient. This is precisely the motivation for including other right-side variables in a multiple regression; but while multiple regression gives unbiased results for the effect size, it does not give a numerical value of a measure of the strength of the relationship between the two variables of interest.

In statistics, the concordance correlation coefficient measures the agreement between two variables, e.g., to evaluate reproducibility or for inter-rater reliability.

Krippendorff's alpha coefficient, named after academic Klaus Krippendorff, is a statistical measure of the agreement achieved when coding a set of units of analysis. Since the 1970s, alpha has been used in content analysis where textual units are categorized by trained readers, in counseling and survey research where experts code open-ended interview data into analyzable terms, in psychological testing where alternative tests of the same phenomena need to be compared, or in observational studies where unstructured happenings are recorded for subsequent analysis.

Financial correlations measure the relationship between the changes of two or more financial variables over time. For example, the prices of equity stocks and fixed interest bonds often move in opposite directions: when investors sell stocks, they often use the proceeds to buy bonds and vice versa. In this case, stock and bond prices are negatively correlated.

Data-driven control systems are a broad family of control systems, in which the identification of the process model and/or the design of the controller are based entirely on experimental data collected from the plant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Batch normalization</span> Method used to make artificial neural networks faster and stable by re-centering and re-scaling

Batch normalization is a method used to make training of artificial neural networks faster and more stable through normalization of the layers' inputs by re-centering and re-scaling. It was proposed by Sergey Ioffe and Christian Szegedy in 2015.