Lambdia

Put call parity

4 articles

Certain Upside, and the Twelve Dollars of Insurance You Do Not Need

A call is a forward with a put stapled to it, because (s-X)+ minus (X-s)+ equals s-X for every terminal price, so with rates at zero and the strike at today's price the call and the put cost exactly the same 11.9235. Every penny of that premium buys protection against a fall the question has ruled out, which is why the forward pays 20 on a certain rise to 120 against the call's 8.0765, a factor of 2.476. The volatility fixes the size of the mistake and never its direction: at 60 percent the call actually loses 3.58 on a certainty.

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A Straddle Bought for $5 Pays on a $2 Move, If You Sell It

Held to expiry the position needs the full five dollars and a two dollar move loses three, but the same move sold the next morning is worth 5.4405. Nothing is assumed to get there: the five dollar price pins the volatility at 35.5424 percent and the position's slope at exactly a tenth. That slope is why the gain is lopsided, and why one dollar down loses money while two dollars down gains six cents.

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Ten Percent Up Is a Smaller Move Than Ten Percent Down

The put reaches its strike more often, 0.3348 against 0.2821, and the call is still worth more, 4.2920 against 3.5891. The mechanism is not the unbounded-upside story, which would predict a gap at the money where put-call parity provably gives none; at a zero rate the 110 call equals 1.1 times a put struck at 90.909, and the put on offer is struck lower than that. The article also records two circulating claims that fail at these strikes, since the in-the-money chances at r = sigma^2/2 are 0.3168 and 0.2992 rather than equal, and the price ratio is 1.63 rather than 2.

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Unlimited Upside, Identical Price

An at-the-money call has no ceiling on its payoff and an at-the-money put is capped at the strike, yet at a zero interest rate the two cost exactly the same. The reason is put-call parity and it uses no model at all: the difference of the two payoffs is a straight line, so pricing it needs only the risk-neutral mean. The equality was checked on five terminal distributions with mean at the strike, and on a sixth whose mean is 120, where the gap is exactly 20.

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