Stock loan lotteries and individual investor welfare

PurposeThis paper proposes and models stock loan lotteries, a financial innovation that improves individual investor welfare. Stock loan lotteries are prize-linked payoffs using securities lending fees.Design/methodology/approachThis paper solves an existing theoretical model for an investor's utility-maximizing choices with and without stock loan lotteries and compares outcomes.FindingsStock loan lotteries motivate prospect theory investors to buy and hold risky assets with high expected returns. Stock loan lotteries improve welfare more for poor investors and improve welfare more in a model with market frictions such as trading costs.Social implicationsStock loan lotteries increase household savings, leading to greater financial wealth and security in retirement.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a new financial product that improves financial outcomes for individual investors.

Regime Classification and Stock Loan Valuation

For traditional perpetual American put options under regime-switching models with positive risk-free interest rates, optimal stopping usually can occur in any regime. Nonetheless, if the risk-free interest rates are allowed to equal zero (the interest rate may drop to zero sometimes in reality), there may exist “continuation regimes” within which optimal stopping can never occur, that is, within which stopping is never optimal. A natural problem is “regime classification,” that is, determination of all continuation regimes. In “Regime Classification and Stock Loan Valuation,” Ning Cai and Wei Zhang develop a unified, fixed point approach to solving this regime classification problem under general regime-switching exponential Levy models with any finite numbers of regimes and general Levy types. Applying this result, they also provide a unified framework for the valuation of infinite maturity stock loans under general regime-switching exponential Levy models.

Pricing of Margin Call Stock Loan Based on the FMLS

In common stock loan, lenders face the risk that their loans will not be repaid if the stock price falls below loan, which limits the issuance and circulation of stock loans. The empirical test suggests that the log-return series of stock price in the US market reject the normal distribution and admit instead a subclass of the asymmetric distribution. In this paper, we investigate the model of the margin call stock loan problem under the assumption that the return of stock follows the finite moment log-stable process (FMLS). In this case, the pricing model of the margin call stock loan can be described by a space-fractional partial differential equation with a time-varying free boundary condition. We transform the free boundary problem to a linear complementarity problem, and the fully-implicit finite difference method that we used is unconditionally stable in both the integer and fractional order. The numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate differences of the margin call stock loan model under the FMLS and the standard normal distribution. Last, we analyze the impact of key parameters in our model on the margin call stock loan evaluation and give some reasonable explanation.

Pricing Stock Loans with the CGMY Model

The empirical research shows that the log-return of stock price in finance market rejects the normal distribution and admits a subclass of the asymmetric distribution. Hence, the pricing problem of stock loan is investigated under the assumption that the log-return of stock price follows the CGMY process in this work. Under this framework, the pricing model of stock loan can be described by a free boundary condition problem of space-fractional partial differential equation (FPDE). First of all, in order to change the original model defined in a fixed domain, a penalty term is introduced, and then a first order fully implicit difference schemes is developed. Secondly, based on the numerical scheme, we prove the stock loan value generated by our method does not fall below the value obtained when the contract of stock loan is exercised early. Finally, the numerical experiments are implemented and the impacts of key parameters in the CGMY model on the value and optimal redemption price of stock loan are analyzed, and some reasonable explanation should be given.