Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

In this note the maximization of the expected terminal wealth for the setup of quadratic transaction costs is considered. First, a very simple probabilistic solution to the problem is provided. Although the problem was largely studied, as far as authors know up to date this simple and probabilistic form of the solution has not appeared in the literature. Next, the general result is applied for the numerical study of the case where the risky asset is given by a fractional Brownian motion and the information flow of the investor can be diversified.

In this paper the study of a three-parametric class of Gaussian Volterra processes is continued. This study was started in Part I of the present paper. The class under consideration is a generalization of a fractional Brownian motion that is in fact a one-parametric process depending on Hurst index H. On the one hand, the presence of three parameters gives us a freedom to operate with the processes and we get a wider application possibilities. On the other hand, it leads to the need to apply rather subtle methods, depending on the intervals where the parameters fall. Integration with respect to the processes under consideration is defined, and it is found for which parameters the processes are differentiable. Finally, the Volterra representation is inverted, that is, the representation of the underlying Wiener process via Gaussian Volterra process is found. Therefore, it is shown that for any indices for which Gaussian Volterra process is defined, it generates the same flow of sigma-fields as the underlying Wiener process – the property that has been used many times when considering a fractional Brownian motion.

We find the best approximation of the fractional Brownian motion with the Hurst index $H\in (0,1/2)$ by Gaussian martingales of the form ${\textstyle\int _{0}^{t}}{s^{\gamma }}d{W_{s}}$, where W is a Wiener process, $\gamma >0$.

We consider the simulation of sample paths of a fractional Brownian motion with small values of the Hurst index and estimate the behavior of the expected maximum. We prove that, for each fixed N, the error of approximation $\mathbf{E}\max _{t\in [0,1]}{B}^{H}(t)-\mathbf{E}\max _{i=\overline{1,N}}{B}^{H}(i/N)$ grows rapidly to ∞ as the Hurst index tends to 0.

We show that if a random variable is the final value of an adapted log-Hölder continuous process, then it can be represented as a stochastic integral with respect to a fractional Brownian motion with adapted integrand. In order to establish this representation result, we extend the definition of the fractional integral.