Hedging Options Using Option Delta

The proportions of turnover due to outright forward deals, options and futures were 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent respectively. The market is largely an inter-dealer market: 84 percent of transactions were made among financial institutions and other foreign exchange brokers and dealers in This characteristic is reflected in the average deal size, which for the U.

Deals were relatively smaller in the spot market, in which the proportion of transactions with end-users was higher, while in the derivatives markets deals tended to be higher. The bulk of foreign exchange market activity still involves the U. The dollar was involved in 83 percent of all deals in —including 72 percent of spot trades and 95 percent of swaps contracts—although this proportion had fallen since the previous survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements BIS in The survey results indicate how rapidly the use of financial derivatives has grown in recent years.

While spot turnover increased only 14 percent between and , forward transactions increased 60 percent, as did turnover in currency futures.

Currency Options Step-by-Step

Swaps trading increased 50 percent, and options trading increased by percent. By expanding the opportunities for borrowers and lenders to change the risk characteristics—such as maturity or currency denomination—of their portfolios, the growth in these markets has dramatically altered the nature of international finance and the behavior of market participants. Exchange-traded derivative products—futures and options—are standardized, retail-sized products. Though they are retail in nature they are frequently used by the dealers in OTC markets to balance positions when credit lines with other financial institutions are filled or when wholesale counterparties are hard to find.

The OTC markets in derivative products are concentrated in a small number of large banks and securities firms in the major financial centers. Many OTC trades are inter-dealer trades in which dealers seek to balance their positions. Foreign exchange derivatives are important components of these markets, particularly the OTC markets.

The market segment of particular interest in this paper is the market for options. The options market is divided into two parts: the market for exchange-traded options, and the OTC market. Most listed options are available with a limited choice of maturities up to one year and have American exercise characteristics. Furthermore, OTC options are options on currency rather than options on futures, and the European exercise convention is the norm.

OTC options are also contracted in much higher amounts. The BIS data show that activity in the OTC market segment dominates total trading in currency options, accounting for 85 percent of turnover in April As with the bulk of foreign exchange trading, the U. Assuming that the currency composition of deutsche mark OTC options trading is representative of that for the other ERM currencies, only an estimated 10 percent of the OTC options market involves intra-ERM transactions.

While the BIS does not provide data on the maturity structure of the options market, it does provide it for forward contracts. These show that maturities are heavily concentrated in the near term: 64 percent of contracts mature within 7 days, and only 1 percent have a maturity of longer than 1 year. Open positions denominated in foreign currencies expose market participants to losses from exchange rate changes. Accounting for such risk is vital for portfolio managers with foreign currency exposure, corporates with foreign-currency-denominated assets or liabilities such as receivables or payables, or banks with currency exposure.

These risks can be reduced by taking an offsetting position in the foreign currency. For example, a long position is hedged by shorting the currency in some fashion. This may consist of a spot sale with borrowing in the foreign currency to cover settlement, the purchase of a forward or future contract that locks in the level of the exchange rate for future payment, or the acquisition of a put option or the sale of a call option on the currency.

Options generally provide a partial hedge. For example, a portfolio manager may buy a put option to ensure a floor to the domestic currency value of the foreign currency component of its portfolio, but the portfolio remains subject to risk of currency fluctuations while the portfolio value is above the floor. For example, U. In contrast, U. Institutional investors in Germany, Japan and the Netherlands also invest sizable proportions of their assets abroad. More significant perhaps, there are few restrictions on the foreign investments of institutional investors in industrial countries, and the trend appears to be toward relaxing those constraints that do exist.

Banks, in contrast, often have well-defined position limits—either statutory or self-imposed—on their foreign exchange exposures. Managers of pension funds, mutual funds, and bank trust accounts generally hedge their currency risk, often using dynamic hedging operations to create synthetic securities. For fixed-interest holdings of pension funds with obligations denominated in a given currency, the hedge reflects the desire by fund management to place a floor on the long-term value of foreign-currency-denominated holdings. For funds investing in foreign equities, the long-term reasons for establishing currency hedges is not as obvious because of the long-run tendency for exchange rates to conform with purchasing power parity.

Moreover, fund managers seek to protect short term performance from significant declines to prevent an increase in redemptions. Similarly, for pension funds, underfunding of liabilities may force an injection of securities into the fund that tests the liquidity of the parent entity.

For these reasons, fund managers are sensitive in the short term to exchange rate movements and will wish to hedge positions. In the simplest hedging operation, fund directors may establish currency risk targets or limits to which management must adhere by following agreed hedging strategies. To place an absolute ceiling on losses from currency fluctuations, fund directors may mandate the acquisition of a put option to cover the entire foreign exchange position of the fund.

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If they are willing to bear more risk from volatility changes, fund directors may instruct management to replicate a put dynamically. As indicated below, this buy-high, sell-low strategy will, ex-post, have been less costly than an actual put if volatility declines and more costly if volatility increases. Finally, many portfolio managers follow a constant-percentage portfolio insurance strategy: this is a buy-high, sell-low dynamic strategy that does not replicate a put option. For example, one realization of this strategy may aim at outperforming a fifty-percent hedged position and would begin with a fifty-percent hedge.

A one-percent move in the exchange rate would trigger an x-percent change in the hedge ratio. If the foreign currency appreciated by 10 percent, the hedge ratio would fall to x percent.

How FX Options can Impact Your Trades

Currency depreciations would be met with opposite adjustments in the hedge ratio. The strategy tends to work well when exchange rate changes come in trends but fails with a jump in volatility. Dynamic strategies are often implemented through cross-hedges—that is, a hedge may be implemented through shorting a currency whose exchange rate is highly correlated with the currency in which the fund holds securities.

The purpose is to take advantage of greater liquidity in the exchange market or an interest rate premium in the currency used for the cross-hedge.

Delta Hedging/ Exchange for Currency Options - Quantitative Finance Stack Exchange

Individual firms and portfolio managers ultimately must turn to banks to engage in foreign exchange hedging since banks are the principal dealers in the foreign exchange spot and derivatives markets. By taking the opposite side of a transaction undertaken by a customer, a bank will acquire foreign exchange exposure that it will then attempt to eliminate. Because of internal risk-control operations and regulations on foreign exchange risk, banks are active in using dynamic hedging techniques. Typically, they will hedge the net exposure to exchange rate changes acquired through transactions with clients, but they may leverage exchange risk when trading for proprietary accounts.

Elsewhere, as in, for example, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, guidelines or stronger constraints limit open positions to a specified ratio to total capital. A bank that writes an option becomes exposed to the possibility that the option will be exercised and it will have to buy or sell foreign currency depending upon whether it has written a put or a call.

The simplest hedge in this case would be to acquire a perfectly offsetting contract. For a bank that maintains a large options book, many of its options contracts will indeed offset each other. However, to hedge the remaining options exposure, banks will generally turn to the more liquid underlying markets and hedge their exposures by creating synthetic options. Dynamic hedging strategies provide a simple means by which complicated options books can be hedged by constructing synthetic options. As the discussion in Section II indicates, trading in options is only a small part of the foreign exchange market.

As with their options-based exposures, banks will actively hedge their net exposure arising from these other transactions. Moreover, not all options or other transactions entered into by banks are derived from hedging operations. Unlike transactions in the underlying markets, options provide tools for taking positions in the volatility of spot exchange rates or exchange rate futures, instead of or in addition to speculating on the future direction of these underlying assets.

Banks both sell packages of options to their customers that allow them to choose their own degree of exposure to the level, direction of change, and volatility of the underlying asset, and enter into transactions with other dealers to do the same for their own account. The value of the put option, P t , is:. The put price, or premium, is graphed against the spot exchange rate in Figure 1. Note that it is possible for the price of the option to be less than its intrinsic value for deep-in-the-money puts.

The put pricing formula is determined by finding the short position in deutsche mark loans and the long position in dollar loans such that a portfolio with these positions and also short a put is riskless with respect to small exchange rate movements. The basic security in the first half of the formula is a loan promising to deliver 1 deutsche mark in T periods—this has a deutsche mark present value of exp[-r DM T] and a dollar value of exp[-r DM T]S. The coefficient -[1-N d 1 ] indicates that the mimicking portfolio should consist of a short position of a fraction of such a deutsche mark loan—that is, a short deutsche mark position.

However, since d 1 and d 2 constantly move with the exchange rate, the interest rate differential, and the standard deviation projected for exchange rate movements, the positions must be adjusted constantly—hence the term dynamic hedging—to maintain the equivalence of the position to a put option. The foreign exchange exposure of the bank that sells the put is to the possibility of having to buy deutsche mark at the exercise price at date T. Under the assumptions behind the pricing formula, it is not necessary to hedge the total face value of the contract prior to the exercise date.


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From the pricing formula developed above, the delta of a currency put option is -[1-N d 1 ]exp -r DM T. Thus, a rise in the dollar value of the deutsche mark makes it less likely that the option will be exercised and reduces the value of the put. The put delta takes values between -1, for a deep in-the-money option that would almost certainly be exercised, to 0, for a deep out-of-the-money option that would never be exercised see Figure 1. The negative of delta, therefore, provides a proxy for the probability of exercise. Delta multiplied by the number of units of foreign currency provides an estimate of the expected foreign exchange that is sold short at any point in time to hedge against possible exercise of the option.

A writer of a put option may, therefore, hedge the option dynamically according to the prescriptions of the put pricing formula. Treasury bills.

As the exchange rate fluctuates, the now-hedged writer of the option must adjust the short deutsche mark and long dollar positions according to the formula to continue to mimic the option. Typically, the adjustments will not be continuous; instead, to avoid transactions costs, adjustments to the mimicking portfolio will be made as part of a regular rebalancing exercise. Among other assumptions, the put pricing formula is based on assuming that exchange rate volatility will remain constant during the life of the contract.

If volatility jumps above the value implicit in the price of the actual put option, the writer of the put who engages in dynamic hedging will take a loss and the buyer of the put will gain. It is well known that strategies to create synthetic options to hedge actual options through the use of dynamic trading, designed to be delta neutral, can be used to take positions on volatility in underlying prices and in interest rates. The loss to the writer is immediately apparent if the portfolio is marked to market. A volatility increase will, ceteris paribus, increase the value of the actual option a liability and leave unchanged the value of the hedging portfolio the supposedly balancing asset.

Alternatively, if the option value is not marked to market, the loss will be booked through the dynamic adjustment of deutsche mark and dollar positions until the exercise date. According to the hedging strategy, a rise in the exchange rate will cause the writer of the put to reduce the short deutsche mark position: the writer of the option will buy deutsche mark when the deutsche mark appreciates and sell when it depreciates.

If volatility jumps, however, the premium will be insufficient to cover the now greater-than-expected realized loss on these hedging trades. To hedge the risks acquired from their OTC options transactions with other dealers, banks generally construct a dynamic hedge by purchasing or selling currency in the spot market to close the currency exposure, and entering into a swap contract to shift the exposure to coincide with the maturity date of the option.

In order to monitor its overall exposure, a bank must have a method to break down each option in its book into its implied foreign exchange position. It can then determine its global net position in each currency by adding its net position from trading in other foreign exchange products to its net position implied in its options book, and then hedge the combined exposure.

Delta hedging

The foreign exchange equivalent into which a bank will decompose its options will depend on the currency options pricing formula used by the bank, but it will usually be based on delta hedging methods. The bank calculates the delta for all the contracts it has written or bought and multiplies these by the face values of the contracts. These are then added up for each currency to estimate the expected net foreign currency delivery requirement. For European-style options, in which exercise is only possible at maturity, the hedge portfolio will include futures or forward contracts that offset these amounts, while for American-style options, the hedge will include cash positions because the exercise date is uncertain.


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Because the management of the foreign exchange book is global, the amounts required to hedge the options will be netted against spot and forward net positions. If the bank is also long deutsche mark in its forward and spot trading, it can determine its global foreign exchange exposure in deutsche mark by adding these three quantities. The bank can then hedge the foreign exchange risk by taking the opposite position in the forward market.

Because the implied delivery dates across its deutsche mark contracts may differ, this still leaves the bank with an interest rate risk that can be hedged through appropriate deutsche mark forwards or swaps. Given the centrality of delta to the construction of the hedge portfolio, it is worth considering its properties. In particular, we are interested in identifying the response of delta to changes in the parameters of the model. Unfortunately, these relationships are often not monotonic.