Bachelor 2025/2026

Mathematics of Finance and Valuation

Type: Elective course (International Programme in Economics and Finance)

Delivered by: International College of Economics and Finance

When: 4 year, 1, 2 module

Open to: students of one campus

Instructors: Yaroslav Lyulko

Language: English

Course Syllabus

Abstract

This is an introduction to an exciting and relatively new area of mathematical application. It is concerned with the valuation (pricing) of ‘financial derivatives’. These are contracts which are bought or sold in exchange for the promise of some kind of payment in the future, usually contingent upon the share-price then prevailing (of a specified share, or share index). The course reviews the financial environment and some of the financial derivatives traded on the market. It then introduces the mathematical tools which enable the modelling of the fluctuations in share prices. Inevitably these are modelled by equations containing a random term. It is this term which introduces risk; it is shown how to counterbalance the risks by putting together portfolios of shares and derivatives so that risks temporarily cancel each other out and this strategy is repeated over time. As this procedure resembles hedging a bet – that is, betting both ways - one talks of dynamic hedging. The yield of a temporarily riskless portfolio is equated to the rate of return offered by a safe deposit bank account (that is a riskless bank rate) which is assumed to exist; this equation assumes that the market which values shares and derivatives actually is in equilibrium and hence eliminates the opportunities of ‘arbitrage’ (such as making sure profit from, say, buying cheap and selling dear). The no-arbitrage approach implies in the continuous time model that the price of a derivative is the solution of a differential equation. One may either attempt to solve the differential equation by standard means such as numerical techniques or via Laplace transforms, though this is not always easy or feasible. However, there is an alternative route which may provide the answer: a calculation of the expected payment to be obtained from the contract by using what is known as the synthetic probability (or the risk-neutral probability. One proves that, regardless of what an investor believes the expected growth rate of the share price to be, the dynamic hedging acts so as to replace the believed growth rate by the riskless growth rate. Though this may seem obvious in retrospect it does require some careful reasoning to justify. The course considers two approaches to risk-neutral calculation, using discrete time and using continuous time. Continuous time requires the establishment of a second-order volatility correction term when using standard first-order approximation from calculus. This leads to what is known as Ito’s Rule. Finite time arguments need some apparatus from Linear Algebra like the Separating Hyperplane Theorem. We enter the subject from the discrete time model for an easier discussion of the main issues.